Prudy Whalen

SOC 400
Professor Schubert

September 28, 2016

For my final paper, I am interested in writing something about how a persons

socioeconomic status and upbringing influence how involved they are in social justice
movements. For Qualitative Reasoning last semester, I formulated a research question that
focused on finding out if there was a correlation between a students involvement in the Why We
Wear Black Movement on Dickinsons campus and their upbringing and socioeconomic status.
Interestingly enough, I found that those that self-identified as coming from a lower-class were
more involved in the movement than those who self-identified as being from an upper-class.
In taking this class on postmodernism, I thought it would be interesting to explore this
topic from a different point of a view. There are two avenues I could take with this final paper.
The first would be talking about Lyotards idea of waging war on totality. The entire focus of a
social movement is to fight against a larger institution and to fight against what Lyotard would
call a metanarrative. I would use his idea of mini-narratives and explain how social movements
are waging war on totality in order to eliminate the monotony of the larger narrative.
The other avenue I could take would be to explore the language surrounding social
movements. I would use the words and phrases that people use to describe those who actively
participate in social movements and analyze what that says about those who participate and those
who do not participate, and are merely commentating on the social movement at hand.
Depending on the media outlet, the words surrounding the same social movements are very
different. This could be to perpetuate that specific outlets agenda, or for some other reason. I
think it would be interesting to analyze why some outlets use specific words to describe the same
thing. Sometimes, words do speak louder than actions.