Ghostsites: Wathistory

WatHistory is a YouTube site I’ve been meaning to write about but, for whatever reason, never got around to doing so until now. I guess I was inspired by the sociology ghostsites theme because this site seems to have something of a chequered history. Although the Twitter account ceased trading in 2018 and the .com website may never have existed, there is a Weebly Website still in existence. It doesn’t, however, look like it’s been updated in a long time. A big clue being the last blog entry made in 2014. Nothing, but nothing gets past me.

Interesting as I find these things, I’m wholly-prepared to except not everyone does, so, moving swiftly on, what does WatHistory (did you see what I did there?) have to offer the sociology teacher looking to blag some free resources?

First up are a small number of videos (and by “small” I actually mean “five”) covering two main areas:

1. Perspectives (Marxism, Feminism and Functionalism): these are all around the 10 minute mark and conform to the classic “podcast with pictures” format. The teacher (Mr Watkins) voice overs his way through a number of static slides. The style is all-very-pleasant and painless, depending upon your level of tolerance for such things.

2. Revising and Answering Exam Questions (Methods in Context, Education). The oft-mentioned aim of the films is “How to get an A/ A* in Sociology” and these exam walkthroughs are designed to help students do just that. Whether or not they achieve this aim is, of course, always a moot point.

And while I’d personally like the aim of all this kind of stuff to be “How to understand the world in which you live a little better” I’m perfectly prepared to accept that the commodification of knowledge has become an embedded feature of our system (whether or not it’s actually “education” is anyone’s guess).

A second set of resources mainly relate to Religion (a couple, for whatever reason, cover What is Sociology? and Identity) and involve a mix of course information and exam advice, some PowerPoint Presentations and some Word documents. There’s nothing here to blow your socks off – some looks useful, some doesn’t, so it may just be a question of looking through it all to see if there’s anything you can scavenge…

Marxist Feminism

Secularisation