Message to Students

Thank you for joining us on this adventure into the beautiful and complicated world of social problems. We challenge you to bring an open mind and a curious heart to this exploration.

This book is powerful. We explore the social problems that you and other students may face by integrating powerful theories, current data, and compelling stories from People of Color, women and nonbinary people, poor people, queer folx, people of different abilities, immigrants, and many others who experience injustice.

This book is beautiful. We use photos, art, music, charts, graphs, infographics, and videos in addition to words to tell the truth about inequality, injustice, and interdependent solutions.

This book is transformative. We invite you to explore your own life through the lens of power and privilege to consider how you benefit from or are harmed by oppressive systems, and how you can take action to dismantle them. We celebrate the work of educators, researchers, activists, organizers and others whose work to end racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, nativism and other intersectional structures of oppression inspires us to take action.

As part of our commitment to justice, this book is openly licensed and free of charge. By providing free, high-quality, equity-minded, anti-racist materials, we support making college education both more accessible and transformative.

We designed this book to engage all of you. The chapters average about an hour and a half of required reading and video content. Your actual engagement time may differ depending on how fast you read (and how many jobs you have while you are in school).

You will notice that we have added many links to videos, blogs, papers, and other sources throughout the book. Unless the text says, “Please read” or “Take a moment to watch,” those resources are there for you to learn more if you want to. You may find them helpful as you work on your assignments or if you are just plain curious to learn more.

This text pairs with the course Sociology 206: Social Problems. You will find assignments and discussion questions that help you understand these readings more deeply.

Now click the button in the lower right corner labeled “Next →” to turn the page!