In this piece Daniel Núñez uses the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away to illustrate Mead and Cooley’s classic theories of how each of us develops our sense of self. In the hit movie Cast Away, released in 2000, Tom Hanks plays a plane crash survivor (whose name is Chuck Noland) who finds himself in the middle of the South Pacific, stranded in a small, uninhabited...

In this piece, Amanda Fehlbaum uses the holiday film Elf to illustrate how people are socialized into their communities. It is the holiday season and with that comes a selection of movies shown repeatedly from Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day. One such film is Elf (2003), a story starring Will Ferrell about a human named Buddy raised by elves at...

In this post, Jena Morrison illustrates how Allport’s Contact Hypothesis can create meaningful conversation about racial divides and historical monuments out of confrontation. On Saturday, September 16th a protest about Confederate monuments was set to occur in what is basically my own backyard. As a sociologist, I felt obligated to go and observe...

In this post, Jena Morrison looks at the Las Vegas shooting on October 2, 2017. By examining a national tragedy through the lens of Structural Functionalism, the concepts of anomie and social solidarity are illustrated. And, deviance can be seen as having both dysfunctional and functional impacts to society. For many of us, the morning of October first...

In celebration of Halloween and in preparation for the Season premiere of The Walking Dead, Jesse Weiss utilizes Social Contagion Theory to explain irrational group behavior. He uses the zombies as a metaphor for how frightening groups of people can be. For George… In July, millions of people mourned the death of horror movie icon George A. Romero....

In this post, Beverly Yuen Thompson looks at the significance of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy Magazine, in light of his recent passing. He introduced and marketed a magazine of nude women, literary articles, and interviews with cultural icons to the American mainstream man. The feminist movement responded to Playboy, and pornography in general, in...