Sociology Videos: Suggested Streaming Videos

We live in the Age of Plastic. It's cheap, it's practical, and it's everywhere - from the highest mountains to the hottest deserts, from the North Pole to the South Pole. It's even part of us - inside our blood. Should we be worried?

Through the stories of workers and entrepreneurs in the U.S. and China, Catching the Sun captures the global race to lead the clean energy future.

Asian carp have invaded the Mississippi River, and destroyed its lucrative fishing industry. Today, only an electric fence is keeping them from entering the Great Lakes, and a few have already been spotted. If any more cross that barrier, prepare for Carpageddon. The Brothers find out what an Asian carp invasion could do to the Great Lakes' 4.5 billion dollar fishing economy and examine how other invasive species have changed the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Climate Refugees is the first feature film to explore in-depth the global human impact of climate change and its serious destabilizing effect on international politics. The film turns the distant concept of global warming into a concrete human problem with enormous worldwide consequences. Experts predict that by mid-century hundreds of millions of people will be uprooted as a result of sea level rise and an increase in extreme weather events, droughts and desertification. Little is being done to plan for the potential mass migration of millions of refugees who will be forced to cross national borders. According to the UN, there are already more environmental refugees in the world than political or religious refugees. The Pentagon now considers climate change a national security risk and the phrase "climate wars" is being talked about in war-rooms.

Executive Produced and Narrated by Robert Redford and Directed by award-winning filmmaker Mark Decena, WATERSHED tells the story of the threats to the once-mighty Colorado River and offers solutions for the future of the American West. Can we find harmony amongst the competing interests of cities, agriculture, industry, recreation, wildlife, and indigenous communities with rights to the water? As the most dammed, dibbed, and diverted river in the world, the Colorado River is a lifeline to expanding populations and booming urban centers that demand water for drinking, sanitation and energy generation, struggling to support thirty million people. WATERSHED introduces a hope that illuminates how letting go of the ways of old can lead to a path of coexisting with enough for all.

A comprehensive look at the plight of endangered honeybees around the globe and the potential effects of their extinction. The film considers the scientific, environmental and economic implications of the honeybee epidemic while pushing for a profound understanding of bees on a deeper, often forgotten level.

In Danville, California, Lee Gorewitz wanders on a personal odyssey through her Alzheimer's & Dementia care unit. From the moment she wakes up, Lee is on a quest - for reminders of her past and of her identity. A total immersion into the fragmented day-to-day experience of mental illness, You're Looking At Me Like I Live Here And I Don't is an Alzheimer's documentary filled with charismatic vitality and penetrating ruminations that challenge our preconceptions of illness and aging. Here is one extraordinary woman who will not let us forget her, even as she struggles to remember herself.

UNNATURAL CAUSES sounds the alarm about the extent of our glaring socio-economic and racial inequities in health and searches for their root causes. But those causes are not what we might expect. While we pour more and more money into drugs, dietary supplements and new medical technologies, UNNATURAL CAUSES crisscrosses the country investigating the findings that are shaking up conventional understanding of what really makes us healthy or sick.

This film goes beyond the news headlines to spotlight the impact of the devastating water contamination crisis on the people of Flint, Michigan. The film highlights the stories of residents who were personally injured, along with the work of local organizations and individuals that rallied to support them.

A character driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients.

From botox to bionic limbs, the human body is more "upgradeable" than ever. But how much of it can we alter and still be human? What do we gain or lose in the process? Award-winning documentary, Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement, explores the social impact of human biotechnologies. Haunting and humorous, poignant and political, Fixed rethinks "disability" and "normalcy" by exploring technologies that promise to change our bodies and minds forever.

They clean other people's homes and raise other families' children -- often leaving their own families behind. Maid in America is an intimate look into the lives of three Latina immigrants working as nannies and housekeepers in Los Angeles, three of the nearly 100,000 domestic workers living in that city today. These women's stories vividly reveal how immigrants are redefining their roles, and underscores the vital role they play in many American households. The issue of worker's rights is introduced in the film through Dynamic Workers, a collective of women who have formed their own business to provide job security and benefits, and Domestic Workers Association, a support organization providing information and advocacy.

This documentary, by Christine Choy, is about Chinese workers and Chinese economic development in Ghana, Africa.

Climate Refugees is the first feature film to explore in-depth the global human impact of climate change and its serious destabilizing effect on international politics. The film turns the distant concept of global warming into a concrete human problem with enormous worldwide consequences. Experts predict that by mid-century hundreds of millions of people will be uprooted as a result of sea level rise and an increase in extreme weather events, droughts and desertification. Little is being done to plan for the potential mass migration of millions of refugees who will be forced to cross national borders. According to the UN, there are already more environmental refugees in the world than political or religious refugees. The Pentagon now considers climate change a national security risk and the phrase "climate wars" is being talked about in war-rooms.

Since the 1970s, China has been experiencing the world's largest internal migration. In this program, we look at what internal migration is and why China is experiencing a dramatic population shift from rural to urban centers. Population statistics and graphs are provided to help students understand the significance of this event. The hukou system of household registration, criticized for creating wide ranging social injustices and a ‘floating population' of migrants, is investigated. Woven throughout the video is the fictional account of the challenges farmer Huang Li faces as he moves to the city to improve economic opportunities for himself and his family.

They cross six thousand miles of desert and sea to reach Europe, children traveling alone, on the world's most dangerous migration route. Some of them are as young as seven. BBC travels to the place they're fleeing, the border area between Sudan and Eritrea, where four thousand migrants cross each month, trying to escape Africa's most secretive rogue state. With exclusive access to desert refugee camps, and to the Sudanese border patrols, the program discovers that more lone children than ever before are attempting the route. Some are recruited by the people-trafficking gangs because they are too young to be prosecuted by the European authorities. Panorama speaks to one such 15-year-old who piloted a boat across the Mediterranean with nearly 200 migrants on board.