One major learning objective is to link the ideas, readings, and class activities to social problems taking place in Fort Collins and greater Colorado. Oftentimes, students find that social problems feel far away. While every attempt is made to integrate your personal experiences into this class, you still may not completely see how you are experiencing or contributing to social problems. These assignments get you to read and listen to local news to understand and relate to problems in your community. C. Wright Mills famously wrote, That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary humanity′s self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again…they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences. This passage argues that the sociological imagination helps to comprehend the world around us. This is the goal behind you writing about local social problems. You will write two papers on social problems in Fort Collins or greater Colorado. These are three pages long and address social problems associated with a particular section’s readings and lectures. For example, if we have read and discussed racial inequality, patriarchy, and homophobia over a few weeks, then your paper must also address one of these issues (unless they relate to each other). Use one of the following news sources. If you use another source run it by your GTA first. It must be from within the last year. Do not write on an opinion piece.