Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life

In Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life, Jeffrey E. Nash transforms everyday experiences into sociological insights and understandings. This book is organized into three parts. Part One illustrates the intersection of meanings in selected settings from the author’s own life such as barbershop quartet singing, wrestling, and the effects to his identity of a medical procedure. Part Two deals with humor and its intersection with social identities. Using a close analysis of two television sitcoms separated by thirty years, the author reveals how racial identity has changed to reflect larger changes in society. Through the experience of using an indirect approach to teaching sociology to a group of elderly learners, the intersections of gender, race, class, and age are explored and explained using core sociological concepts and theories. Part Three explores embedded meanings in local social contexts involving social beliefs and activism. The book concludes with an illustration of engaging in public sociology through editorial opinion writing.