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As you know, our Study Abroad in London for 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  But hope springs eternal!  I’m planning to teach this course (SOC203: Sociology through Rock ‘n Roll) in London in July 2021.  For more information on the summer program in London you can contact the NCSU Study Abroad office.

SOC203 is an introduction to the science of sociology.  It is usually taught with a textbook going through the usual topics in an introductory sociology course such as families, crime and deviance, inequality, gender, social organizations, population, and so forth.

But this course is different.  I’m going to use rock ‘n roll — its music, artists, fans, and the industry itself — to illustrate basic sociological concepts.  That’s why the course is titled “Sociology through Rock ‘n Roll” rather than “Sociology of  Rock ‘n Roll”.  This is not a course about rock ‘n roll; that would be a music course, or maybe a history course.  This is a course about sociology using rock ‘n roll to illustrate key concepts.

We’ll spend most of our time out and about in London visiting the iconic sights of British rock ‘n roll: Abbey Road, the Royal Albert Hall, Jimi Hendrix’s apartment, the original Hard Rock Cafe, the site of the Beatles’ Rooftop Concert, and many more.

This blog will take you through the activities — classroom work, site visits, and so forth — that we will be doing in July 2021.  Enjoy!

Day 1: 28 June 2021

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Today is our first day of class.  We will be meeting either in Monticello House (on Russell Square, across Montague Street from the British Museum) or at Richbell House (5 Richbell Place), both located in central London.  These facilities are air-conditioned (a rarity in London) and offer student services such as computers and printers.

Monticello House (on Russell Square)

Richbell House

Richbell House

Today I have four goals:

  • To introduce ourselves and our interests in rock ‘n roll music (each of us has a musical biography),
  • to discuss a brief history of Great Britain to better understand how London got to be what it is today,
  • to discuss some basic facts about the science of sociology,
  • and to begin our investigation of the Rock ‘n Roll Timeline, starting with Delta Blues great Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938)

Our essay assignment this week is to respond to the prompt: What is sociological about music?

 

Day 2: 30 June 2021

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We will meet in the classroom today and continue our investigation of the Rock ‘n Roll Timeline.  My plan is to get up to the mid 1960s and the British Invasion.

This will also lead us to a full-length video entitled How the Beatles Changed the World which will prepare us for our first site visit: a walking tour of Beatles sites in London.

Day 3: 5 July 2021

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Today we will meet at Marylebone Station for our Beatles Walk.  On this walk we will see a number of sights important to the Beatles’ time in London.  We’ll see some of the settings for their movies (the photo below is from the opening scene of their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night),

the apartment where John and Yoko lived (and Ringo and Jimi Hendrix, at different times), the place where Paul wrote “Yesterday”, the registry where Ringo and Paul (twice) were married, and other iconic locations.