SOC356 2023 Essay questions
Please answer ONE of the questions below.
The task description and assessment criteria can be found on pp. 13-14 of the subject outline.
Submit by 4pm Tuesday June 13 via Turnitin on the SOC356 Moodle.
1. What do you think is the rationale for describing some bureaucratic processes as
‘administrative violence’? Is this rationale convincing?
2. ‘The literature on commoning provides a compelling response to the logic of
dispossession, not least because as a conceptual framework it has a credible
understanding of gendered care work.’ Do you agree?
3. What do you think are the most significant obstacles to climate change mitigation and
how can they be effectively addressed?
4. ‘Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons’ (Graeber 2006: 119). How is this
claim supposed to impact on our understanding of the state?
5. Do you think sociologists would be better off devoting their energies to ‘short’ (wage
work, time spent waiting for asylum, medical care etc.) or ‘long’ timeframes (the time
of the Anthropocene, the ‘environmental discount rate’, the decades ahead etc.)?
Why?
6. ‘Environmental and racial justice are distinct issues and must be addressed
separately.’ Do you agree?
7. Does wait time produce political capital as labour time seems to produce economic
capital? If not, why are vulnerable populations made to wait?
8. ‘Mutual aid, like charity, simply redirects resources produced by the capitalist system,
so it really just assists that system by papering over its failures.’ Assess this statement
and justify a position on it.
9. What do you think are the two or three most important changes that will have to be
made to existing political and economic systems to adapt to and address the effects of
the changing climate?
10. ‘Green grabbing demonstrates that large scale land acquisitions are not just primitive
accumulation with more paperwork.’ Do you agree?
