Week 1 Intro and Video Review

Hi everyone my name is Jared and I am a 3rd year Sociology transfer student from Vancouver. In the college I transferred from, most of credits were Criminology credits, but because UBC was the dream, I became an accidental Sociology major with all my Crim classes transferring as Sociology credits. With a little bit of background in Criminology and an interested in Sociological studies, I felt like this course would be a fun interdisciplinary elective for me to take.

Video1- Independence in Latin America

I decided to watch the video on Independence because I know very little about the history of Latin America, and also not very much world history. I knew at one point these lands would have only been populated by indigenous peoples and animals. What I didn’t know is who would come to these lands, and take them over. The first step of Independence is figuring out which empires or colonies ruled these areas of land and what made them different. I found the independence of Mexico to be particularly interesting because of having the United States above them would have made country lines more difficult to deal with, as the Americans were difficult to deal with. In our week one class we talked about “Where (and what) is Latin America?” and in this video they only focused on Spanish speaking and Spanish conquered countries of North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It gives me more of a heads up coming into week 2 class.

Video2- The War on Drugs

Because of my Criminology/Socio background, I found myself having to watch this video as ideas talked about in this video interest me and are what I’m going to school to learn more about. There were obvious suitors for this video such as Mexico and Columbia as pop culture has informed us already through shows like Narcos, and through modern day news of El Chapo. Going into this video I already had a Socio mindset, rater than an economic or historical context when watching the video which helped me understand the deep rationale behind these gangsters and criminals. But also helped me understand the video in a way that many other people might not think. I want to know how an economist, historian, or philosopher would understand this video and how they would react when watching it. Thoughts?

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