These are some of the slides I have developed for this year’s revision lecture for my students on Modern and Contemporary Sociological Theory at Durham. I am posting them here as they may be a useful pedagogical resource for thinking through teaching – not only social (or sociological) theory but also other kinds of social and political thought.
These slides are meant to help students revise and prepare for exams – note that this is not the extensive engagement we seek to encourage in essays, and does not represent the way teaching or revising theory is approached in other modules (or the other half of this module) at Durham. If you are using these (or similar) slides in your own teaching I’d be keen to hear from you!
This is the introductory slide that describes the ‘4C’ approach to revision:
(1) Specify the social, historical and political context of theories;
(2) Discuss their content (and how they approach different elements of social ontology and epistemology – note that this is a longer discussion);
(3) Contribution: discuss how they contributed to sociologcal knowledge, and addressed and challenged preceding/existing theories;
(4) Critique: how have other (or later) theories challenged or deconstructed the theories you are summarizing?
This is an example of how to do this for Critical Race Theory and theories of intersectionality (as difficult as it is to reduce all of this to one slide!)
And here are two more…decolonial and postcolonial theory and (some of the) contemporary feminist theories, performativity and affect
Jana Bacevic 