Teaching Sociology through Violence? The Pedagogical Use and Misuse of Violence in Soc 101 Textbooks

In this article, we examine violence in introductory sociology textbooks. To what extent are students exposed to violence in sociology textbooks, we ask, and how much of this violence is necessary for textbooks’ instructional content? To answer these questions, we conducted a line-by-line content analysis of 22 popular introductory sociology textbooks, identifying every case of violence and analyzing its pedagogical utility. We find that sociology textbooks contain a substantial amount of violence (a median of 252 cases per text) and that, on average, about half of that violence could be removed without affecting the texts’ instructional content. Yet we also recognize that teaching about violence is often necessary. Thus, we argue that educators should approach it with care, recognizing when violence has pedagogical value and when it does not. By analyzing the pedagogical use and misuse of violence in sociology textbooks, this article provides sociology educators with the conceptual and empirical tools for doing so.