Introduction

Welcome to Mapping Social Theory and Sociology*

This site has eight clusters of thinkers:

1. Classical Social Theorists and Early Sociology, 2. Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, 3. Symbolic Interactionists, 4. Critical Theory & the Frankfurt School, 5. Psychoanalysis, 6. Feminist, Gender, Trans & Queer Theory, 7. Globalisation, Environment, Cities and People Movements, and 8. Decoloniality, Southern Theory & Postcolonial Thought. Each cluster is made up of diverse thinkers both familiar and some less so. 

There are three ways you can view thinkers and their works.  Enter from the Introduction main page and you will see the cluster names. Click on the cluster name and scroll down to the thinkers images – hover over the images to see their names – then click to view their works. Each social theorist has a primary source or bibliography. then secondary resources, made up of edited articles with or about the authors’ works, or related works. Extra resources include video links of lectures delivered by the author, a video or written interview with the author, or a radio interview or podcast with or about an author.  Click on links to watch, listen and/or read.  You can also find birth and death, and place of birth details either before or immediately after primary resources.  Similarly, you can find thinkers and their works through Browse Exhibits,(then scroll down) Browse Collections, or search a name, or TAGS.

This is not an exhaustive list, and loose clusters will be added to as this site is an iterative project.

*This site has been built over 15 months beginning with initial discussion with Megan McIntosh, ATI, Dr Julie Kheuns, Ashley Sutherland, SSPS Library liaison stars, and the extraordinary Amanda Belton from MDAP and eLearning and e-teaching’s, Meredith Heinze, and with their support throughout.  Research assistants’, Madeleine Booth and Joseph Daffy worked to add many of the 200 plus thinkers and references with me, into what has become Mapping Social Theory and Sociology.  Both also wrangled some of the early Omeka translation challenges. This site could not have arrived without their labours. The wonderful expertise, suggestions and work of Amanda Belton who cast her magic to transform our google sheets (meticulously created by Maddie, which Joseph then tweeked), into this Omeka teaching and learning site with great alacrity and generosity. Some later additions were possible due to Lei Hou, an RA with the Digital Studio who worked with Amanda and I, (and the last solutions offered by Alex Sherman)  to correct some anomalies and omissions. Dominica Meade also assisted with verifying  last-minute attributions of images. This project was enabled by Unimelb Learning and Teaching Initiative funding, and a Universal Grant. Enormous thank you to everyone involved. Indebted. LD.