Personal Sociology

In Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life, Jeffrey E. Nash transforms everyday experiences into sociological insights and understandings. This book has 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 how a medical procedure changed his identity. Part Two deals with humor and its intersection with social identities. An analysis of two television sitcoms separated by thirty years reveals how racial identity reflects larger changes in society. 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 through sociological concepts and theories. Part Three explores embedded meanings in local social contexts involving social beliefs and activism. The book concludes by engaging in public sociology through editorial opinion writing.