Help I am grad school and I have a paper to do on Sociological Imagnation...PLEASE HELP!!!!?

Question

If it was that easy to type it in the search I would not be asking for HELP!!!!

Answer 1

Imagination is what we use to fill out and interpret dull plain information. Let me take you for three minutes in your mind in a spacetime capsule to the winter of 536/7 and to a place called Deganwy on a north-facing stretch of the western shore of the Island of Britain, in a district then as now known as Gwynedd.

Now, dear student, you are already beginning to use your imagination. You have some sketchy fantasy about where I have gone ahead of you.

You have in front of you in convenient English translation a set of about ten poems by the bard whose title was Taliesin. You have, also translated, an oral tradition in prose about an event that took place in Deganwy that winter known as The Contention of the Bards. You have read in this prose tale about Taliesin, Prince Elffin, King Maelgwn, Maelgwn's son Rhun, and Elffin's wife Angharad. You have read two or three other pieces of oral tradition which, though not from that precise time and place, derive from the wider society of the region and age.

You may also have read up such historical and archaeological information as may exist. You will have discovered the size and shape of King Maelgwn's residence at Deganwy and what it was made of; you will know a basic outline about the diet and climate of the people of that day; and you may know about some jars of Mediterranean origin and some brooches of local design.

When you have some modest understanding of all that, you then go forward and write a description of the circumambient society, the kingdom of which Maelgwn was king. You describe as best you can its culture, its customs and costumes, its laws, its social structure, the roles of priests, bards, horses, kings, princes, knights, and servants, the social status and rights and responsibilities, if any, of the common people, the density of population, the incidence of epidemic diseases and their significance, the structural roles and relative status in society of men and women, the point in life at which boys come of age and at which men or women come to be considered elderly, and the esteem or lack of it in which the elderly are held.

About 95% of what you have written in that description is due to the intelligent application of your sociological imagination. You know nothing about that society from within. You have not lived in it, played a role in it, felt feelings in it, suffered for it, fought for it, given birth in it, or celebrated in it. You have filled out from your imagination the patches of evidence and half-evidence to give a complete and dense picture. You may even have stepped out of your own frame of reference and tried to be in the value system of that time: that too is your imagination is it not? What is written, what has been measured, what was dug up has informed you, but your sociological interpretation is not in strict truth found in what was written, measured and exhibited, but in what your mind has created, out of the written and measured and exhumed, infused with your knowledge of other societies and the questions that you bring from that knowledge onto my time capsule, and then constructed as an interpretation which can never be "the" truth, only, at best, "a" truth. That is the glorious work of your sociological imagination.

Answer 2

I think I would put this in the Higher Education (University +) categorie if I were you....well, I am not, and I only have one thing pertinent to say:
Just by reading the questions and the answers you receive here, should give you a pretty good hint as to where THIS society (the society of computer psychology) is at.
Good Luck~It isn't easy being original

Answer 3

Short paper. The sociologist does not have an imagination, to wit, your difficulty in writing this paper. Is it too late to change your major to something useful and valid?

Answer 4

Believe it or not - if you just typed the phrase into your browser than you'd find your info. You're a grad student, can't you figure it out?