Course Nine · The Complete Micro-Course
The whole introductory sociology canon, rebuilt as 537 numbered videos — each one a single idea, built in the order the ideas depend on each other. Not opinions about society: the discipline itself, from what a theory has to do to count as one to how inequality reproduces itself across generations.
How the course works
Sociology is usually taught as a set of opinions about society, with three theories named early and then forgotten. This course is built the other way. A theoretical perspective comes before the research design that expresses it; a research design comes before any finding it produces; culture and socialization come before the institutions built out of them. Nothing appears before the thing it depends on, and every dependency is a number you can follow back.
Three kinds of video: atoms (one definition, mechanism, or distinction, about twenty seconds), procedures (one method, shown step by step — reading a cross-tabulation, tracing a status attainment), and capstones (several ideas run together on one real case). A set of entries exists purely to name a common misconception and sit next to the correct idea, linked in both directions.
Where a question is genuinely open in the discipline, the course says so and presents the competing positions rather than picking one. Where a claim is empirical, it names its source and its reference period in the video itself.
The whole map
New videos post daily until the course is complete. Live ones link straight to the short; the rest are on their way.
The receipts
Behind the course sits a reference document in which every definition and mechanism is traced to its source. The anchor is an openly licensed university text — OpenStax’s Introduction to Sociology 3e — read against an independent second text, Barkan’s Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, so that where the two differ, the difference is noted rather than smoothed over. Classical claims cite the primary works they come from: Durkheim’s Suicide, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Every empirical claim additionally names its data source and reference period — the Census Bureau, BLS, CDC, Pew — because a statistic without a date is a statistic that will quietly go wrong. Each one is logged and verified before its video is made.
This is outside my own teaching fields — philosophy, logic, and ethics — so the sourcing carries more of the weight than the résumé does. That is the point of publishing it. Spot an error? Tell me the video number and the claim — corrections get made in the open.
Follow along
The course releases in order on YouTube — one idea at a time until all 537 are live. Subscribe to catch each one, or leave your email for an occasional note when a course finishes.
A note when a course finishes. Nothing else.