Interactionist
How is meaning produced in encounters?
Study symbols, definitions of situations, identity, roles, and how patterned interaction builds social reality from the ground up.
Interaction · networks · institutions · inequality · population · change
Sociology
Sociology studies patterned relationships between people and the larger structures they build and inherit. Move across social scales, then test how local rules can generate collective outcomes.
Primary navigation · social scales
Follow a social pattern from encounter to institution to population.
These branches are peers in the curriculum. The scale bands are an analytical map, not a ranking: sociologists move between micro, meso, and macro explanations and use theory and methods across all three.
Signature modelmicro rule → macro pattern
Emergence laboratory · Schelling-style sorting
Local preferences can produce a pattern nobody explicitly designed.
Each occupied cell compares itself with nearby occupied neighbors. If the share of same-group neighbors falls below the selected threshold, that agent moves to a vacant cell. Watch aggregate clustering emerge from a simple local rule.
Model boundary
This is a toy model of residential sorting, not a one-cause explanation of real segregation. Law, discrimination, wealth, housing markets, zoning, institutions, history, and geography also shape real patterns.
Group AGroup BVacant
Satisfied
80%
agents currently meeting the local threshold
Mean local similarity
48%
same-group share among occupied neighbors
Steps
0
71 agents currently below threshold
Simulation controls
What to notice
Compare the threshold you set with the eventual mean local similarity. The system can become more clustered than any single agent explicitly requested because one move changes the neighborhood conditions faced by others.
Theoretical lenses · reference, not navigation
The same evidence can support different questions before it supports different conclusions.
Sociological theories are not colored teams. They emphasize different mechanisms, scales, and kinds of evidence. Strong analysis states which lens is being used and what competing explanations would predict.
Conflict
Who has resources, leverage, and the power to set rules?
Examine inequality, domination, bargaining, exclusion, and how institutions distribute advantages and constraints across groups.
Functional / systems
What relationships hold a social arrangement together, and what consequences follow?
Analyze interdependence, coordination, integration, dysfunction, and the intended or unintended consequences of institutions and norms.