Social constructionism

Social constructionism explains how people create and sustain knowledge, meanings, and social realities through interaction and shared practices. It treats many taken-for-granted categories and institutions as products of historically situated social processes.

Social interaction: The reciprocal actions through which people respond to one another in social situations. Repeated interaction is where shared meanings are negotiated and maintained.
Symbolic interactionism: A sociological perspective explaining social life through meanings formed and revised in interaction. It traces how people construct meanings through everyday encounters.
Peter L. Berger: An Austrian-American sociologist whose work examined religion, knowledge, and the social construction of reality. Berger helped develop the approach's account of institutions and everyday knowledge.
Social construction of gender: The account of gender categories and expectations as shaped by social practices and institutions. It applies constructionist analysis to a powerful system of classification and expectation.
Social constructionism and social constructivism: A comparison of related approaches that emphasize social production of knowledge, with different disciplinary histories and emphases. The terms overlap, but their usage can distinguish social processes from individual learning.
Language: A structured system of signs and conventions used for communication. Words classify experience and help make particular descriptions seem natural.
Social construction of reality: The process by which people create and reproduce shared understandings that become experienced as objective reality. This is the central process the approach seeks to explain.
Thomas Luckmann: A German sociologist known for his work on sociology of knowledge and everyday communication. Luckmann co-authored the foundational account of reality's social production.
Social construction of race: The account of racial categories as historically created and socially consequential rather than fixed biological divisions. It distinguishes constructed racial boundaries from their very real effects.
Essentialism: The view that entities or categories possess defining properties that are inherent and relatively fixed. Constructionist accounts challenge explanations that treat social categories as timeless natural kinds.

Linked from 56 pages