The Social Breakdown

by socbreakdown · · ·

The sociology podcast nobody wants, but everybody needs! Come join us as we break down the complex social world one topic at a time using our sociological imagination.

Are you a newly minted or almost PhD graduate? Have academic job prospects been stressing you out? Look no further - we may have the solution for you! The academic job market isn't looking too hot right now, so here we are with a PhD's Guide to getting a non-academic job! We draw from our personal experiences of navigating the non-academic job market and give you all the practical deets on what search terms to use, what job sites to scour, how to revamp your CV into a resume that's not 15 pages long, and much more!! Tune in to …

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With all this talk about Tik Tok, we wanted to bring you an oldie-but-goodie from 2018 about Context Collapse, an interesting phenomenon that occurs often on social media when various segments of your social network (friends, family, acquaintances,...
We're honoring the queen of sociology, Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, on this last week of Women's History Month by going deep into higher level theory via Black Feminist Thought (BFT as we like to call it). We discuss the history of the Frankfurt school...
We’re getting theoretical this week and tackling Orientalism, a concept and book by the fantastic Dr. Edward Said. If you’re taking a higher-level sociology, anthropology, history, or poli sci class, chances are you’re gonna hear...
Is health a privilege or a right? As a society, how do we come to understand health and its social origins and outcomes? Though medicine has been understood as a social science that dates back to Hippocrates–the Hippocratic Oath–medical sociology...
Since it's V-day, we wanted to rerelease one of our first episodes from 2018 about LOVE. In this episode we explore what happens in our brains when we are struck with love, how sociologists like Charles Cooley and Theodore Kemper see love, and how...
Triggered by "China Balloon Incident" of Feb 2023, we wanted rerelease this episode to consider the questions... with the internet, social media, and all of our new technology, do we have privacy anymore? We start the episode off talking about the...
If you're like us, you're probably snacking on something right now trying to get through your day. It goes without saying how important food is to our survival, but beyond the biological needs, there is a whole system surrounding food. This episode is...
What is “humor” and what is “comedy”? Do these terms mean the same thing? Today we answer these questions with the help of Dr. Raul Perez, author of ‘The Souls of White Jokes’ and scholar of what exactly “funny” is and “funny”...
Itʻs strange to say that workplace violence has any place in society. It doesnʻt. But workplace violence does exist, and so today we are going to take a functionalist approach to talk about the functions of workplace violence, particularly in...
Are you Black Friday shopper, like Penn? Or are you ambivalent, like Ellen? This week, the ladies of the Social Breakdown get together for a breakaway episode on the history of Black Friday and the many sociological purposes of holiday shopping. What...
More and more today’s educators are encouraged to set up service learning and community-based projects for their students. These are projects that take students out of the traditional classroom, and into the community to ideally be helpful. But, are...
Drugs. Alotta us do them and alotta us are scared of them! There are a ton of topics to cover within the world of sociology, and we have yet to talk about how the discipline discusses drugs, as well as the pivotal event, the War on Drugs. So, tune in...
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October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, the time when everything turns pink! We here at The Social Breakdown wanted to remind everyone with breasts (pssst– we ALL have ‘em!) to do all the needed check ups: self-exams, ultrasounds, and...
What makes you, “you”? Well, sociologists love to answer this question by saying that you are a social object– a combination of the environments, people, cultures, social experiences, and structures around you. And no one is more prolific than...
What is socialization? And why do we sociologists *love* using the term? This week we're diving into both of these questions, and then exploring how families, educational institutions, peers, and the media act as key agents of socialization. We're...
We’re baaaaacck! Welcome to the start of our 5th school year together. (Yep, you read that right: *fifth* year!) We’re getting things going with a quick talk story session between Omar and Ellen about the symbolic meanings of life in 2022....
This week, we’re exploring how sociology makes sense of our material culture. What is the relationship people hold with the tangible objects we collect? What meaning do we attach to these items? And why is it that Penn cares so much about her Washi...
Why can't we pick our nose in public? We're back this week with our series- not-a-series "Don't Ask a Sociologist!" We talk about what norms are - it's a word you hear a lot but Sociology has a specific definition. What purposes do norms serve in our...