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.
Jeffrey E. Nash is professor emeritus at Missouri State University and former chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: Personal Sociology Part One Chapter One: Ringing the Chord: Sentimentality and Nostalgia Among Male Singers Chapter Two: Wimps Need Not Apply: The Construction of Masculinity in Youth Wrestling Chapter Three: Penile Implants: Embodying Medical Technology Part Two Chapter Four: Framing Race in Two Acclaimed Television Comedy Series Chapter Five: Laughter and Humor in the Classroom and Beyond Part Three Chapter Six: Lives Worth Saving: The Moral Paradox of Life Chapter Seven: A Coal Fired Plant is Born Chapter Eight: Personal and Public Sociology
Personal Sociology is one of the most engaging books I've read. Nash takes the reader on a journey from classical sociology to public sociology, from the micro to the macro with fearless candor. Making deep connections from his own lived experiences, Jeff Nash brings sociology to life! From Baptisms to Army clerks, from penis implants to Barbershop singing and wrestling, we learn how the self is contextual, emotional, embedded, embodied and necessarily tied to the social world. From sitcoms and humor to social movements and ideologies, we see insightful sociological application to bureaucracy, organization, religion, humor, emotions, moral discourse, intersectionality, race and gender. All this is accomplished with personal appeal. Through autoethnographic sketches, what is revealed is Nash is a sociologist in every sense. Relevant, timely, vivid, this book provides the novice sociologist with all the important concepts but without the dry reading of a textbook. It reminds us as sociologists, there is empirical meaning in hovering close to the ground. -- Lori C. Holyfield, University of Arkansas, Little Rock Personal Sociology is one of those books that hooks you after two paragraphs. This book is a gem, and no one who reads it will fail to be impressed by its deep intelligence, wide-ranging scholarship, and passionate humanitarianism. One of the strengths of this book is the parade of insights it affords. Prof. Nash shows how endemic personal ambitions, desires, relationships, and conflicts are to any sociological project. His own life may be his but not his alone, and every sociologist will recognize similar patterns in their own sociological career. -- Charles Edgley, University of Arkansas, Little Rock
