Sociologist Zheng Zuoyu uses the journey from individual and family to school, workplace, nation, globe, and outer space as a living map of society. The course introduces major ideas including social facts, stratification, bureaucracy, discipline, alienation, emotional labor, social acceleration, and resonance.
Rather than promising an easier life, sociology offers coordinates for understanding why modern life feels exhausting, suspended, and beyond our control—and for imagining how it might be otherwise.
