Sociology

Reading Theory is Different! On Deep Reading and Intellectual Patience

 “Theory texts are not puzzles to be solved, but companions to think with.” — Sara Ahmed

Discussion: What do you read? How do you read? 

What is Deep Reading?

• Deep reading involves active, reflective, critical engagement with complex texts — it’s not about speed, but depth.
• Contrast with surface reading (reading for gist, facts, or plot).
• Originates in literary theory but is vital in philosophy, feminist theory, sociology, etc.

 Why Theoretical Texts Are Hard (and That’s Okay)

• They often use specialized language.
• They might feel circular or dense because they’re abstract.
• You’re not supposed to “get it all” on the first read — instead, build understanding over time and across contexts.

*Puwar writes from within a tradition of feminist and postcolonial critique — she's speaking both with and against an academic lineage.

Different Modes of Reading

Strategic Reading of Feminist Theory

• Read with a question in mind: e.g., “How is power embodied here?”
• Highlight threshold concepts: e.g., “somatic norm,” “space invaders.”
• Read with humility: allow the text to surprise you.
• Be okay with discomfort: theory can unsettle — that’s its job!

Strategic Reading in Theory — Key References

Feminist theorists also have takes on how to read complicated texts.  Here are some examples.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith – Decolonizing Methodologies

• • Suggests that academic knowledge is shaped by colonial structures — reading must be critical and contextualized.

Sara Ahmed – Living a Feminist Life

• • Ahmed suggests theory is lived, not just read. Reading feminist texts means letting them transform how you see the world.

bell hooks – Teaching to Transgress

• • hooks talks about “engaged pedagogy” — reading is a practice of freedom, not just mastery.

Rita Felski – The Limits of Critique

• • Challenges the idea that reading must always be adversarial — proposes “postcritical” reading that balances critique with attachment and understanding.

Barbara Christian – The Race for Theory (1987)

• • Warns that theory can become too abstract, alienating those who live the realities being theorized. Use this to remind students why deep reading must stay grounded in lived experience.

Suggested Strategies

(...In other words...why am I here talking to you about this stuff?)

Authority is Constructed and Contextual (Frame 1)

Information, in any format, is produced to convey a message and is shared via a selected delivery method.  The iterative processes of researching, creating, revising, and disseminating information vary, and the resulting product reflects these differences (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2016).

• Information creations are valued differently depending on the context and purpose for which they are created
• Audience matters. Certain things are created for specific purposes and don't make one format of information better. It is up to us to discern what information process best fits our information needs.
• In your own creation process, understand that your choices in what type of information you use, impact the purpose for which the information product you create will be used and the message it conveys.

“Who gets read as trustworthy in a research space? How does embodiment matter in scholarly authority?”

Research as Inquiry (Frame 4) 

Research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions whose answers in turn develop additional questions or lines of inquiry in any field.

Research is a process of asking complex, open-ended questions and exploring them through investigation. Rather than seeking a single correct answer, this frame emphasizes that inquiry is iterative — ideas evolve over time as new information is discovered, and understanding deepens. Students learn to ask increasingly sophisticated questions, recognize gaps in existing knowledge, and value the process of exploration itself. Inquiry involves engaging with sources critically, identifying various perspectives, and seeing research as a creative, reflective, and recursive endeavor.

Deep reading is part of developing inquiry-based habits: you ask what’s assumed, what’s missing, what’s contested.

Scholarship as a Conversation (Frame 5)

Communities of scholars, researchers, or professionals engage in sustained discourse with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of varied perspectives and interpretations.

This frame highlights that scholarship is not static or authoritative in a top-down way; instead, it's an ongoing dialogue among scholars, communities, and ideas. Researchers build on, respond to, critique, and reinterpret each other’s work across time and disciplines. Participating in this conversation involves understanding the context of ideas, citing others ethically, and contributing new insights. Students are encouraged to see themselves not just as consumers of information, but as potential contributors to academic and public discourse.

How do terms like “somatic norm” fit into a larger conversation — not just facts, but contributions to a discourse? For your final project, do other theorists address this or respond to this concept? How?

Source: Project Cora https://www.projectcora.org/assignment/information-spectrum

Activity – Dissecting Dense Sentences (25–30 minutes)

We are going to break out into small groups for the next bit.  I have put together some difficult passages. Work in your group to slow down and unpack your assigned passage. Use the tools we’ve discussed: chunking the sentence, looking up unfamiliar terms, asking good questions, and reading with care. Each group has a different excerpt.

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

Group 4

Group 5

I have created a research matrix template that might help you make notes/keep track of your weekly readings.You can download a copy and edit it if you think it will help!

How to use the template

Column 1: Add citation details for each reading.

Column 2: List 2–3 theoretical terms or key ideas (e.g., somatic norm, disciplinary power, intersectionality).

Column 3: Summarize the core argument in your own words.

Column 4: Think about which real-world sociological issues this reading helps explain — e.g., hiring bias, immigration policy, institutional racism.

Column 5: Identify overlaps or tensions with other texts. Do authors agree or disagree? Build on one another?

Column 6: Note how this reading might help you with a final paper, research question, or case study.

Next visit, try to be prepared with ideas about your final project topic.  We will workshop where to look for other scholarship to support the topic, through the libary, Google/Google Scholar. I will show you some databases, demonstrate how to develop a search strategy, and show you some other cool stuff. 

Exit Ticket

On a sticky note, write down one concept or phrase you understand better now, or one question you still have.

There are 3 main components of the assignment

• Social Issue Description

• Literature Review

• Theoretical Analysis

Lit review = theme-based, not summary

Theoretical analysis = argument, not name-dropping

A literature review is:

• a synthesis or overview of the research on a particular topic
• a critical analysis of the existing literature
• a means to identify gaps in the existing research or areas of further study

A literature review is not:

• A list of articles
• An annotated bibliography

What is the purpose of a literature review?

Graphic by TUS Library Midlands, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Example of a weaker synthesis:

“Many studies examine gender inequality. Smith (2015) looked at wage gaps; Jones (2017) found that women report higher stress levels in the workplace; Lee (2019) notes that access to healthcare is often worse for women in rural areas. It is clear from past research that gender, class, and race are relevant. However, there is less work looking at gender and disability together, or at how women’s caregiving roles affect access to health services in urban settings.”

What’s weak:

• The summary of each study is quite disjointed (“Smith did this,” “Jones did that”) rather than organized into themes.

• There is little comparison or synthesis: how do findings agree/differ? What are shared patterns?

• The gap is identified, but the literature review doesn’t show how issues like intersection (gender + race, etc.) have been treated in relation to the gap.

• There’s no strong linkage back to theory or conceptual frameworks.

Example of a stronger synthesis

“A theme emerging across multiple studies is the compounding impact of race, class, and gender on women’s economic and health outcomes. Smith (2015) documents the wage gap along gender lines but importantly finds the gap widens significantly for women of colour. Similarly, Jones (2017) emphasizes that workplace stress is exacerbated by racial discrimination, while Lee (2019) shows that rural women, particularly Indigenous women, face multiple barriers to accessing healthcare—not only distance and resource constraints but also discrimination and lack of culturally sensitive services. These findings are consistent with an intersectional lens as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins’ ‘matrix of domination’, which posits that social inequality is structured through interactions among multiple forms of oppression. Yet, what remains underexplored in existing literature is how disability interacts with these axes of marginalization, especially in urban caregiving contexts—where infrastructure exists but systemic bias and normative ableism may still block access. This suggests a gap not simply in empirical settings, but in theoretical framing, as few studies adopt intersectionality robustly to analyze gender, race, class, and disability together.”

What makes it stronger:

• Literature is thematically organized: race/class/gender interplay, rural vs. urban differences, caregiving, etc.

• The review doesn’t merely report but synthesizes: shows patterns and connections across the studies.

• Theory (intersectionality/matrix of domination) is used as a lens to interpret what the literature shows and what it misses.

• The gap is clearly articulated and tied to theory: both empirical and conceptual gaps are identified.

Now you try!  

In small groups take a look at these two excerpts.  Which one is stronger? What are the weakness? Strengths? 

Excerpt 1

“According to bell hooks (1994), patriarchy is a central problem in society. Many authors have also discussed class, gender, and race inequalities (Collins, 2000; Mohanty, 1988). Gender inequality affects women’s health, economic access, and social status. We need to address these inequalities using feminist frameworks like intersectionality.”

Excerpt 2

“bell hooks (1994) theorizes patriarchy not just as an ideological superstructure but as embedded in everyday institutions—but to fully understand how patriarchy operates in contexts of health, we must use intersectionality, as Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and Mohanty (1988) illustrate. For example, Collins’ concept of the ‘matrix of domination’ reveals that women who are Indigenous and low income experience not just additive disadvantage, but qualitatively different oppression: policy neglect, discrimination in medical settings, and economic exclusion. Mohanty’s critique of universalizing ‘women’s experiences’ shows that many health‐studies assume whiteness as norm, thereby erasing the specific harms faced by racialized women. Thus, applying intersectionality allows us to see why general gender inequality interventions fail those who sit at multiple marginalized intersections.”

Using the Library and Tools to Use

LibrarySearch is MRU Library's one-stop search interface/catalogue that brings together resources across format, time, and subject. 

We have about 1.3 million e-resources and 221,000 physical resources in our collection, and LibrarySearch searches across those.

Things to remember when using LibrarySearch:

1. Sign in to save searches, items, and to request materials.

2. Use the pin icon to save books and articles to your Favorites for future reference.

3. Use the filters on the right. You will use Availability, Resource Type, and Date filters most often. Filter settings can be "locked in" so that you don't have to reapply them to every search that you make.

4. Some items may not be available, however, you can request unavailable items using what is called interlibrary loan.

5. When viewing an item record, scroll down to the Get it (for hardcopy/physical items) or Access options (for electronic items) section to get access to the item.

Helpful Search Operators to Use in LibrarySearch

You can use what are called search operators to search in a way to combine or omit different terms by telling the search engine exactly what you want and this can help you save some time (and frustration!)

• Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

  • "social media"

  • "public space"

  • "inclusive design"

  • "fast fashion"

• Use AND to combine search terms (LibrarySearch automatically creates an AND when you write terms one after another, but it can be good practice to use an AND to help you understand the searches that you build) (AND narrows your search):

  • "social media" AND privacy

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms (OR broadens your search):

  • "social media" OR "social networking"

• Use wild cards to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol:

  • access* (in this example, the search access* will search for records that contain strings such as accessible and accessibility)

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another great way to find high quality resources.

Besides providing links to resources in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories that contain articles the author has been allowed to upload.  Academia.edu and ResearchGate are among the repositories searched by Google Scholar.

By clicking on the Settings icon, you can select library links to show library access for up to 5 libraries (type in Mount Royal and click on save).  If you are logged into MRU library, links should automatically populate if you are running a Google search in another window. 

Google Scholar has a nifty citation chaining function. The Cited by function will forward you to indexed scholarly material that has cited a resource that you may be interested in. The Related articles link will direct you to similar articles that may have the same metadata or keywords. 

Sociology Databases 

Journals to Consider

Signs - High impact feminist theory and intersectionality.

Feminist Studies - Academic and activist feminist frameworks, often addressing systemic inequalities.

Canadian Journal of Women and the Law - Excellent for topics involving law, policy, and feminist critique in Canada.

Hypatia - Feminist philosophy and theory.

Journal of Gender Studies - Accessible feminist analysis of culture, identity, and institutions.

Canadian Review of Sociology  - Canadian social issues, with some feminist research.

Atlantis - Canadian-based feminist scholarship, intersectional focus.

Critical Sociology - Anti-capitalist, critical theory, class and structural critique.

Topic Example: Unpaid care work in their family (due to their father's illness) and how this intersects with personal survival skills.

For Final Paper (based on feedback from Irene and peers)

• Examine survival under capitalism, especially in light of unmet health needs

• Use course readings to analyze:

  • How we survive in a capitalist society

  • What changes are needed to make society more accessible

  • What structural barriers prevent these changes

• Reflect on what you have learned about capitalism, survival, and social structures

Bridging Excercise

Take a look at my revised Research Matrix.  I have added a column specific to the sample topic we have been workshopping in class. 

Activity

1.Get into groups and bridge the readings.  How do you think they relate to one another so far? 

For example, 

• How might Monture’s survival strategies intersect with Puwar’s somatic norm?

• How might Roberts’s ideas about reproductive control expand or complicate Puwar’s institutional focus?

• Identify one tension, one synergy.

2. Workshop your own questions/topics and make direct connections to the 3 course readings

Groups should take note of:

• One concept from their group’s readings they must incorporate in their theoretical analysis

• One question or critique they’ll need to address (e.g. “Puwar doesn’t account for disability—how do I incorporate that?”)

• A one-sentence draft of how they might use the concept in their argument

3. Share insights as a larger group

Peer Review Do's and Don't's!

Do!

1. Read the entire submission carefully. Read through once without writing notes. Then re-read with attention to detail.

2. Start with a summary of what the author is doing. Show you understood their argument and main points. This builds trust and clarity.

3. Be specific and concrete. Instead of: “This paragraph is confusing.”

   • Try: “The transition between the theory and example in paragraph 3 could be clearer. Consider linking it back to your earlier definition of ‘survival.’”

4. Engage with the argument, not just grammar. Focus on content, logic, structure, and theory use — not just surface-level errors.

5. Ask clarifying questions. e.g., “How does this point relate to the reading by Smith (2022)? Could this strengthen your argument?”

6. Use a respectful, supportive tone. Remember: your goal is to help them improve, not to evaluate them as a person.

7. Offer suggestions, not solutions. You don’t need to rewrite the paper — instead, offer options or ideas for improvement.

8. Refer to the assignment criteria. Use the rubric or prompts to guide your feedback: Are they using all readings? Is their theoretical analysis developing?

9. Highlight strengths. Let them know what’s working well — e.g., a strong claim, a good use of theory, or a clear structure.

Don't!

• Don’t be vague. Avoid feedback like “Good job” or “Doesn’t make sense.” Be clear about what is working or what needs improvement.

• Don’t focus only on typos or grammar. This is about improving ideas and arguments. Grammar comes later.

• Don’t make it personal. Critique the work, not the writer. Say “The paper could benefit from...” not “You didn’t…”

• Don’t rewrite their ideas for them. Suggest, guide, and question — don’t take over.

• Don’t skip parts of the paper. If they submitted an outline and literature review, comment on both. Don’t only focus on the part that’s easiest to review.

• Don’t assume your interpretation is the only correct one. Offer your perspective, but acknowledge that there are multiple valid approaches.

Sources that Can Help

Peer Review Checklist Template

Step by Step Guide to Reading a Manuscript (Wiley) - A clear, structured guide to how a peer review (of a journal manuscript) can be organized: summary, major issues, minor issues, style tips.

Peer Review (UBC) - Offers practical tips like reading aloud, giving feedback from the reader’s perspective, and avoiding vague judgments.

A Field Guide to the Review Process - Focuses on the broader role of peer review in scholarship and how to write reviews that strengthen work.

Citation Help!

• Use the "cite" feature in most search tools to get you started with most resources (you will need to review and correct the citation).

• Cite Sources: Learn the correct way to cite sources by using these guides, tutorials, and videos.

  • MRU Guide to APA Style for Referencing (2025-2026)

  • MRU Guide to APA Style for Formatting a Paper (2025-2026)

  • Citing Images Using Figure Notes in APA Style

  • MRU Guide to Visual and Verbal Citation

  • Citation for Presentations and Videos (short video)

• Academic Success Workshops: Academic Success Workshops are 75 minutes long and are offered both in-person and online. Registration is required.

• Appointments: Personalized online or in-person 30-minute appointments with a Learning Strategist at Student Learning Services located on the 2nd floor of the Riddell Library & Learning Centre.

• Use the Service Desk on the 1st floor of the RLLC for assistance as well as the library chat feature on the library website for quick citation questions.

 AI Resources