Author Message to Future Instructors

Inequality and Interdependence: Social Problems and Social Justice explores how people experience social problems and challenges us to imagine a more equitable world. In addition to the common topics of homelessness, harmful drug use, and inequality in education among others, we add unique chapters on environmental injustice, mental health, and death and dying. Finally, we offer an extended case study of weaving community recovery after a wildfire, exploring how communities experience simultaneous social problems and resilience in resolving them. These new topics are particularly relevant to students in this time of pandemic, climate crisis, and racial injustice.

Chapter Structure

Each chapter follows a similar narrative arc. We begin with a story or video about the social problem in question. With these stories, we engage our students with curiosity and empathy. Then we discuss what makes this problem a social problem, using the social problems process or characteristics of a social problem. We provide evidence of inequality and injustice based on various social locations for each social problem. Then, we explore powerful sociological theories and models that assist the students in making sense of racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and other intersectional structures of oppression. However, describing and explaining the problem is not enough. We consider what is to be done, evaluating interdependent solutions to social problems that demonstrate individual agency and collective action. We encourage students to unpack oppression and take action for social justice by including one or two activity boxes per chapter, so students apply crucial concepts of power and justice. Finally, we summarize our learnings for our students, with essential ideas, an interactive review of key terms, and discussion questions and class activities.

Three Themes

You might also ask why we chose inequality, interdependence, and social justice as our themes. Many of you would choose equity rather than inequality, for example. Although we agree that equity is essential, understanding inequality is essential in making sense of social problems. People die earlier than normal, or live longer than average, partially based on their unequal access to food, water, health care, and housing. People die sooner when they are exposed to more police violence, war, intimate partner violence, environmental harm, and other immediate and slow violence. A core issue in a social problem is inequality itself.

Our response to inequality connects interdependence and justice. We depend on each other to survive and thrive. This interdependence is a source of our ability to act collectively. When we imagine a world in which all people get what they need and take action to co-create that world, oppressed people get social justice.

Three Commitments

Power, Privilege, and Positionality: As you read, you may notice that the authors refer to their own experiences. You will see pictures of other sociologists, with as much description of their positionality as we could find. This is a deliberate attempt to be explicit about our power, privilege, and positionality. Like Patricia Hill Collins, we see our lived experience as valid evidence in our sociological inquiry. Furthermore, like Julian Go, we see that our positionality influences what we present as important in our work. By making positionality explicit, we engage our students in considering both how they might engage in sociological thinking, and how the social construction of the world is steeped in relationships of power and privilege.

Oppression, Resilience, and Resistance: In this book, you will see d/Deaf people, neurodiverse people, queer people, People of color, Latinx people, poor people, immigrants, people who are chronically ill or dis/abled, people who have lost everything in natural disasters, and others. We purposely looked for the students, scholars, activists, and ordinary people who are making sense of the inequality of today’s world, imagining a more just future, and taking action. We are unflinching in naming the harm caused by oppressive systems and unflagging in our commitment to hope, resilience, and resistance.

Collaborating to Dismantle Oppression: We deliberately provide an alternative to the lone writer or lone scholar creating knowledge in an isolated, ivory tower. Instead, our work is embodied and collaborative. As a writer returning to the field after years of absence, I relied on my co-writers to bring the most transformative sociology the field has to offer and share innovative practices in teaching and learning. The book includes curated resources so that you can join us in this collaboration. More than that, our students are co-creators of this material. They bring their questions, their experiences, and their authentic selves into the classroom. Their scholarship, their art, and their stories enrich this work.

Empowering Students

Finally, our project equity statement says that we share “…course materials that directly address and interrogate systems of oppression, equipping students and educators with the knowledge to do the same.” In this work, we created graphs, charts, and models that describe social inequality and intersectionality. We curated the work of others who make sense of interlocking systems of power, and who model interdependent, intersectional solutions. We deliberately call our students to be anti-racist, and to combat heteropatriarchy, ableism, xenophobia, and other oppression when they see it in themselves and others. Love and empathy are essential in doing the work of social justice but insufficient. We must also see the systems of oppression that we inherited, notice when our laws and our behaviors sustain them, and take action to dismantle them. Only then do we create a more just world, a world in which each person is whole and free.

About Course Packs

This book includes openly licensed course materials, also known as open course packs, for future educators to review, use, and adapt to their own teaching. An open course pack is an aligned and accessible set of openly licensed course materials that fully integrate with the open textbook. Anyone can retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute them. Best of all, future instructors can build on existing learning pathways that are fully aligned with textbook learning outcomes and content.

Oregon instructors designed each course pack in consultation with an instructional designer and, in most cases, revised each course pack based on feedback from Oregon students and an advisory board of workforce members. In each course pack, you will find a complete course map, an instructor guide, and ancillary materials including assignment prompts, rubrics, and suggested activities.

Open course packs from Open Oregon Educational Resources are designed with an equity lens. This means that they center the voices and experiences of underserved student populations. They are designed with equity-minded pedagogies, including Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT), and Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), and Open Educational Practices (OEP).

[Link to course pack site]

Licenses and attributions for Instructor Resources

Author Message to Future Instructors by Kimberly Puttman is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

About Course Packs by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.