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Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions

Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions

Essay Questions Guide

Critical sociological approach Essay Questions Overall: Critical sociological approach. Can argue for a neuro/biological point of view, but sociologically — and must engage with sociological critiques.

Many of these questions are quite expansive, leaving you with a lot of choice regarding how you craft your own argument.  Your first priority then is to circumscribe your focus: what do you want to focus on, and why?  Can you present a cohesive argument on this chosen focus in 1750 words?  Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions. With a tight word count depth of analysis is better than breadth of coverage ie. if you try to do too much you will end up with only a series of superficial statements that don’t cohere to presenting a persuasive argument.

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If it helps, consider setting up the introduction to your essay with these components:

CONTEXT: What will this essay focus on, and why is it important?

CONCEPTS: What key ideas will guide your analysis? (look at the way the authors in your readings set up their key concepts)

CONTENTION: This is important: What is your overall argument?  What do you wish to convince the reader of?

CONTENT: What will you focus on in each part of the essay in proving this argument?

Below are some very brief guiding suggestions for each essay question.  These suggestions are not intended to be comprehensive, but merely to serve as prompts to perhaps help get you going and orient your discussion. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions

  1. What is harm reduction? Do you agree with critics who view it as a form of neoliberal social control (e.g. Roe 2006 & Miller 2001)?
    1. Discuss the definition of harm reduction – who developed it, when did it arise, who is it targeted at, etc.
    2. Discuss examples of harm reduction – does it put these ideas into practice?
    3. Discuss the Roe & Miller arguments that it’s a form of neoliberal social control. Are there any parallels between their claims and modern examples of harm reduction programs?
    4. Is neoliberalism a useful idea for interrogating modern approaches to drug-use and harm reduction?
  1. How does drug use legislation/regulation construct and uphold social binaries of normal/abnormal and good/bad citizenship? Use one or two specific examples to illustrate your answer.
    1. What is good/bad citizenship? It could be useful to draw on Foucault’s theories of governmentality here.
    2. Discuss the historic regulation of drug use in relation to social anxieties.
    3. Discuss specific examples of drug use legislation – this can include doping in sports, the partial regulation of drinking/smoking, etc. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.
    4. You could also consider anti-drug campaigns here, and how they construct the ideal citizen.
  1. Is intoxication a cultural phenomenon?
    1. WHY?
    2. Discuss popular assumptions about intoxication (physiological/chemical phenomenon) versus the argument that it is a cultural phenomenon.
    3. Deconstruct the idea of intoxication along cultural lines. Use a specific idea(s) to focus discussion & deconstruction (e.g. gender; class; ethnicity)
    4. How does approaching intoxication as a cultural phenomenon change the significance/role of intoxication in society?
    5. Examples (from the reading and further research)
  1. ‘Particularly for youth, identity is formed in the sphere of consumption. Consumer societies depend upon constantly stimulating wants and needs, generating a constant search for sensation and excitement, and producing a proliferation of styles, fashions and consumer identities’ (Brain 2000, Youth, Alcohol and the Emergence of the Post Modern Alcohol Order, p.5).
    Discuss, focusing on the relationship between illicit drug use and identity construction.

    1. How has the idea of consumption played a role in the discourse on drug-use? How has it been problematized? What exactly are drug users consuming when they do drugs? Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.
    2. Connection to larger ideas about identity formation – the roles and expectations that emerge from the formation of specific identities
    3. Keep in mind: identity construction is not really a choice!
    4. Example (from the readings and elsewhere) Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions
  1. Critically assess the use of ‘gender verification’ and subsequent potential use of hormonal treatments as an element of contemporary ‘athlete citizenship’ (Henne, 2015).
    1. What is actually being ‘verified’ here, considered as metonymic for ‘gender’?
    2. Why do sporting governance bodies insist on policing this form of ‘pollution’, this apparent ‘matter out of place’?
    3. What are the implications of bounding ‘gender’ within biological matter, as something that can be ‘treated’ through chemical intervention?
  1. ‘…gender does not just influence the way people ‘do drugs’ but drug use itself can be seen as a way of ‘doing gender’ (Measham 2002 p. 351). Discuss in relation to one or two specific examples.
    1. Discussion of significance of gender in drug use.
    2. How specifically do drugs “do gender”, aiding gender as performative?
    3. What’s the significance for rethinking drug use? Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions. How might it affect the various ways that we approach drug use (legislatively, politically, medically)?
    4. Connection between the micro & the macro? Agency & structure?
  1. Is pleasure the enemy of health?
    1. What is “pleasure”? What is “health”? (in contemporary Western settings)
    2. Role of pleasure in the discourse on drug use (how it has been ignored, discredited, decried; more recently how it has been paid attention to [but for whom, specifically? Who gets to feel pleasure?]; how it has been controlled [harm reduction; methadone clinics; etc])
    3. What role does pleasure play in drug use? How has it been conceptualized? Has it been pitted as naturally antagonistic with health/non-drug using? What does this say about how we view the nature of pleasure, versus the nature of health, versus the nature of drug use?
    4. DO NOT just describe, make an argument Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

Critical sociological approach Essay Questions Essay Reading Suggestions

You should start with the required and supplementary readings which are relevant to your chosen topic. These can be found not only on the topics, but listed in the course outline document – the course outline lists supplementary readings which are not necessarily uploaded so you should check both.  Don’t forget that relevant material can be found in readings that were set for different weeks.

You should also check the pdfs that have been uploaded as ‘extras’ and reviewing the lecture powerpoints is a good idea in general as I have generated the essay questions out of the issues raised in the lectures.

Some of the required readings were taken from book length studies which may have chapters relevant to your specific topic, for example the Hunt book has chapters on gender and ethnic identity.

Also remember that the essay you write should reflect the fact that you have done THIS course. 

Intoxication as a Cultural Phenomenon

Macandrew and Edgerton can be the starting point here, but there is obviously a lot of relevant material in the readings for the second part of the course. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

I’ve uploaded another recent article on styles of drunken comportment on wattle, as well as Becker’s classic account of learning to become a marijuana user. Also remember to look at Robin Room’s critique/update of Drunken Comportment published in Social Science & Medicine referenced in the powerpoint.

Kuendig, H. et al. (2008) Alcohol-related adverse consequences: cross-cultural variations, European Jnl of Public Health, 18/4.

Room, R. and Bullock, S. (2002) Can alcohol expectations and attributions explain western Europe’s North-South gradient in alcohol’s role in violence? , Contemporary Drug Problems, 29.

Martini, M. & Measham, F. (2008) Swimming with crocodiles: The culture of extreme drinking, Routledge.

Wilson, T. (ed.) (2005) Drinking cultures: Alcohol and Identity, Berg. (Ebook available through ANU library).

Bogren, A. (2008) Women’s intoxication as ‘dual licentiousness’: An exploration of gendered images of drinking and intoxication in Sweden, Addiction Research and Theory, 16/1.

Normalisation

Duff, C. (2003) Drugs and Youth Cultures, Jnl of Youth Studies, 6/4.

Shiner, M. & Newburn, T. (1997) Definitely, maybe not? The Normalisation of

Recreational Drug Use, Sociology. 31.

Holt, M. (2005) Young people and illicit drug use in Australia, Social Research Issues,

Paper No. 3.

Parker et al. (1998) Illegal Leisure, Routledge. Also Illegal Leisure Revisited, ebook available through chifley.

Parker, H. (1997) Adolescent drug pathways in the 1990s, in J. Braggins (ed) Tackling Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions

Drugs Together.

Also Measham and Measham  & Brain’s articles on drinking and drug use in the UK and the more recent work by Measham and Shiner, referenced in the powerpoint.

Drug Use and Identity Construction (including masculinity and femininity) 

This is another broad topic, many of the readings in the second part of the course will be relevant.

Griffin, C. et al. (2013) Inhabiting the contradictions: Hypersexual femininity and the culture of intoxication among young women in the UK, Feminism & Psychology, 23(2), 84-206.

Lindsay, J. (2012) The gendered trouble with alcohol: Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions Young people managing alcohol related violence, International Journal of Drug Policy, 23, 236-241.

Henderson, S. (1999) Drugs & Culture: The question of gender. In N. South (ed.)

Drugs: Cultures, controls and everyday life.

  1. Hughes (2007) Migrating identities: the relational constitution of

drug use and addiction,  Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. 29 No. 5

Hubbard, P. (2013) Carnage: Nightlife, Uncivilised Behaviour and the Carnivalesque Body,  Leisure Studies, 32/3.

An interesting article on masculinity and the social requirement to drink is G. Patton-Simpson, 2001, Socially obligatory drinking, Contemporary Drug Problems.

Tomsen, S. (1997) A top night: Social protest, masculinity and the culture of drinking violence, British Journal of Criminology, 37/1.

Waitt, G. et al. (2011) The guys in there just expect to be laid’: embodied and gendered socio-spatial practices of a ‘night out’ in Wollongong, Gender, Place & Culture, 18/2. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

On femininity:

McRobbie, A. (1994) Shut Up & Dance: Femininity and Youth Culture in her

Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Routledge.

Hinchcliff, S. (2001) The meaning of ecstasy use and clubbing to women, International Journal of Drug Policy, 12.

Boyd, J. (2010) Producing Vancouver’s (hetero)normative nightscape, Gender, Place & Culture, 17/2.

Pini, M. (2001) Club cultures and Female subjectivity. Macmillan.

Hutton, F. (2006) Risky Pleasures: Club cultures and feminine identities, Ashgate

(I have a copy of this book if you want to borrow it).

Bogren, A. (2008) Women’s intoxication as ‘dual licentiousness’: An exploration of gendered images of drinking and intoxication in Sweden, Addiction Research and Theory, 16/1. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

Pleasure and Health

Check week 10 lecture references.

Williams, S. (1998) Health as moral performance: Ritual, transgression and taboo, Health, 2/4.

Keane, H. (2009) Intoxication, harm and pleasure, Critical Public Health, 19/2. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

Lindsay, J. (2010) Healthy living guidelines and the disconnect with everyday life, Critical Public Health, 23/4.

MacLean, S. (2005) It might be a scummy-arssed drug but it’s a sick buzz: chroming and pleasure, Contemporary Drug Problems, 32, 295-318.

Hunt, G. et al. (2007) Drug use and meanings of risk and pleasure, Jnl of Youth Studies, 10/1.

Niland, P. et al.  (2013) ‘Everyone can loosen up and get a bit of a buzz on’: Young adults, alcohol and friendship practices, Int. Jnl of Drug Policy, 24.

Hubbard, P. (2013) Carnage: Nightlife, Uncivilised Behaviour and the Carnivalesque Body,  Leisure Studies, 32/3. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

Critical sociological approach Essay Questions: Drug-Using Mothers

Banwell, C. and G. Bammer (2006). “Maternal habits: Narratives of mothering, social position and drug use.” International Journal of Drug Policy 17(6): 504-513.

Ettoree, E. Revisioning Women and Drug Use, International Journal of Drug Policy. Volume 15, Issues 5-6, December 2004, Pages 327-335.

Maher, L. (2000) Sexed Work.

Olsen, A. et al. (2012) Positive health beliefs and behaviours in the midst of difficult lives: Women who inject drugs, International Jnl of Drug Policy, 23/4.

 Critical sociological approach Essay Questions- Drug Use Legislation

Keane, H. (2003) Critiques of Harm reduction, morality and the promise of human rights, International Journal of Drug Policy, 14(3), 227-32.

Vrecko, S. (2020) Civilizing technologies and the control of deviance, BioSocieties, 5, 36-51.

Motherhood, pregnancy and the regulation of identity: The moral career of drug treatment, Social Science & Medicine, 72, 984-991.

Bourgois, P. (2001) Disciplining Addictions: The bio-politics of methadone and heroin in the United States, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, Vol 24(2), 165-95.

LSE Ideas (2012) Governing the global drug wars (http://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/research/reports/governing-drugs)

Reinarman, C. (2011) Cannabis in cultural and legal limbo, in Fraser, S & Moore, D (eds) The Drug Effect

Fraser, S. & Valentine, K. (2009) Substance and Substitution: Methadone subjects in liberal societies, Macmillan

Critical sociological approach ESSAY QUESTIONS

Please title your essay with the question number. Please also include ‘FEEDBACK’ in your title if you wish to receive detailed feedback on your essay, eg; Question2_Feedback. Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.

Please choose one of the following questions. As the essay weighs high, please choose carefully and follow the guidelines given.

  1. What is harm reduction? Do you agree with critics who view it as a form of neoliberal social control?
  2. How does use legislation construct and uphold social binaries of normal/abnormal and good/bad citizenship? Use one or two specific examples to illustrate your answer.
  3. Is intoxication a cultural phenomenon?
  4. ‘Particularly for youth, identity is formed in the sphere of consumption. Consumer societies depend upon constantly stimulating wants and needs, generating a constant search for sensation and excitement, and producing a proliferation of styles, fashions and consumer identities’ (Brain 2000, Youth, Alcohol and the Emergence of the Post Modern Alcohol Order, p5). Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions. Discuss, focusing on the relationship between illicit drug use and identity construction.
  5. Critically assess the use of ‘gender verification’ and subsequent potential use of hormonal treatments as an element of contemporary ‘athlete citizenship’ (Henne, 2015).
  6. ‘…gender does not just influence the way people “do drugs”, but drug use itself can be seen as a way of “doing gender”’ (Measham 2002, 351). Discuss in relation to one or two specific examples.
  7. Is pleasure the enemy of health? Critical sociological approach Essay Exam Questions.