SOCI-123 Introduction to Sociology
This course uses a sociological framework to examine the nature and structure of modern industrial societies. To identify central trends in society and culture, this course covers several basic themes, such as social inequality and social interaction, that have appeared repeatedly in the works of major social thinkers.
SOCI-214 Race in America: Inequality, Immigration, and Other Issues
From the Black Lives Matter movement to debates about immigration and a color-blind America, race and ethnicity are at the forefront of contemporary public discourse. In this course students will be introduced to the various sociological perspectives and theoretical frameworks used to understand racial and ethnic relations in the United States. We will discuss the dynamics of individual racial and ethnic groups including African Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and White Americans. We will also examine what the concepts of race and ethnicity mean and how they affect various aspects of American society.
SOCI-216 Special Topics in Sociology
SOCI-216DR Special Topics in Sociology: 'Dialoguing for Racial Change'
A critical analysis of race, racism, and justice in the United States, as set in a. socio-historical context defined by power. In addition to traditional modes of teaching-learning, students use intergroup dialogue and collaborative group work to examine how race is constructed, experienced, reproduced, and transformed within social structures. Topics include racial identity development and how individuals internalize and 'live race' in everyday interactions; historical mechanisms for how bodies and spaces have become 'raced' over time; institutional dimensions of racial inequality (e.g., law, education, popular culture); and practices for pursuing racial justice.
SOCI-216DU Special Topics in Sociology: 'Schooling in American Society'
COVID-19 has upended schooling in the United States. Assumptions about physical co-presence, standardized testing, the rights of students, and the responsibilities of schools have all been transformed at warp speed. The pandemic also exposed durable fault lines in American education and society. This course provides an opportunity to evaluate our present moment using classical and contemporary sociological perspectives on mass schooling. It highlights issues facing the future of education, the role of schooling in struggles for economic and racial justice, and how the aspirations of individuals and families interact with state institutions to shape the American social and economic order.
SOCI-216EC Special Topics in Sociology: 'Sociology of Economic Life'
Money makes the world go round." "Money talks." "Time is money." Money permeates our lives. We engage in economic transactions, relations, and markets on a daily basis; yet, we rarely think about the social bases of economic life. What is money? Are we driven by rationality or morality? How are different markets structured? What explains growing inequality and indebtedness? This course applies the theoretical and empirical tools of sociology to study economic behavior. Using case studies from around the world, we analyze how economic life is shaped by social institutions, networks, culture, and relations of power. Students critically study several topics, ranging from inequality, financial crises, and debt, to finding a job.
SOCI-216FM Special Topics in Sociology: 'Families, Kinship, and Sexuality'
How do family and kinship shape our social lives? In turn, how are family and kinship shaped by social and historical contexts? We all come to this course with individual experiences of family, kinship, and sexuality, but this course will ask you to critically engage with these concepts from a sociological perspective. In this course we will both define and use an intersectional lens to understand how class, race-ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and citizenship mutually shape our individual and collective experiences of family and kinship. We will consider family as a site for reproducing inequality and violence, but also as a site for resistance, revolution, and home.
SOCI-216MV Special Topics in Sociology: 'Gender and Social Movements'
This course will focus on the relations between gender, politics, and social change to explore the gendered character of citizenship, political participation, and mobilization. We'll start by considering what makes a social movement, who mobilizes, and what resistance has, does, and can look like in practice. Students will engage with historical and contemporary cases of feminist and women's social movements to explore how gender constructs both formal political participation and activism. We will explore how feminist and women's movements have contributed to alternative practices of politics and visions of social change and wellbeing.
SOCI-216PT Special Topics in Sociology: 'Political Sociology'
This course focuses on political processes and power -- in particular, which groups have the ability to implement their political, social, and economic agendas, which ones do not, and why. We will explore the means by which certain groups affect political outcomes that shape society and social- political reality. In particular, we will concentrate on the interrelationship between the state, the market, and civil society, and investigate how this intersection has informed the politics of our time. By the end of this course, students are expected to have achieved an understanding of the major theoretical perspectives and debates in political sociology, and a sense of the historical and contemporary organizations, parties, classes, and other groups that influence social change. We will focus mostly on western democracies, especially the U.S., but other countries and political arrangements will also be included. Globalization as an on-going social, political, and economic system will be discussed throughout the semester.
SOCI-216QD Special Topics in Sociology: 'Qualitative Research and Data Analysis'
This course introduces students to qualitative research methods. In the course students will get basic training in the collection and analysis of qualitative research data, develop experience writing and presenting qualitative data, gain exposure to the theoretical assumptions underlying qualitative inquiry, and learn insights about the ethical responsibilities surrounding qualitative social analysis. We will focus on methods such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, and close observations. This course will provide students with the skills and knowledge to pursue qualitative data analysis in future projects such as for an independent study, senior thesis, or internship. In addition, since cases will focus on consumer research, this class is also well-suited for students who want to learn qualitative research techniques that are used in marketing.
SOCI-216RN Special Topics in Sociology: 'Religion and Inequality'
What is religion and how does religion intersect with inequality? This course explores sociology's foundational understandings of religion -- including why people are religious, how religion is expressed in social terms and forms, and how sociologists have studied religion -- before interrogating the impact of Western secularization, and how religion and religiosity intersects with modern dimensions of social and material inequality. Readings will include selections from across the global religious landscape, with particular attention to the dominant world religions.
SOCI-216SE Special Topics in Sociology: 'Sociology of the Self'
Who are you? This course asks: how have the 20th and 21st-century social sciences constructed the self, and what are the consequences of these understandings? Topics will include the major shifts in historical understandings of the self in the West, including the growth of "identity;" the development and impact of medicalization and scientization in the social sciences; the competing theoretical traditions of the self in sociology; cultural meanings and stigma; and how dominant Western constructions of the self influence global understandings. This course consistently considers understandings of the self from a lens of power: who gets the authority to decide who we are; what does inequality look like at the level of the self, and why does how we view ourselves matter? Readings will include classical and contemporary texts in sociology as well as selections from philosophy, history, and psychology.
SOCI-216TX Special Topics in Sociology: 'Text as Data I: From Qualitative to Quantitative Text Analysis'
Characterizing, categorizing, and counting text documents is at the heart of research and knowledge development in the social sciences and humanities. New digital technologies have introduced new methods for analyzing text documents on a massive scale. These computational approaches have also provoked important debates about the role of meaning, context, and reproducibility in social science research. This course considers the affordances of new digital methods for text analysis in relation to established practices of qualitative coding. Students will explore this new frontier in a hands-on manner using Python to count and compare relevant features of text documents in large data sets.
SOCI-216WK Special Topics in Sociology: 'Sociology of Social Work'
Sociology and social work -- what's the difference? This course examines, from a sociological perspective, the history and current organization and operation of social welfare systems in the United States. It examines the social aspects of the welfare system and how certain issues have become the focus of social services, with a specific focus on the case of intimate partner violence. It will explore the professionalization of social change and reform, relationships between social workers and clients, and how gender, race-ethnicity, class, and sexuality shape the current welfare system in the U.S.
SOCI-223 Development of Social Thought
This course examines the origins and development of sociological theory in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the three most important representatives of the classical tradition in sociology - Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim - we consider in detail the ideas of each, compare their perspectives on emerging industrial society, and assess their contemporary significance.
SOCI-225 Social Science Research and Data Analysis
This course is an introduction to the use of quantitative data in sociology. It focuses on the ways in which data is collected, analyzed, and presented to make sociological arguments. It introduces various tools to describe data for single variables, explore relationships between pairs of variables, and make statistical inferences. Students will learn basic skills to conduct their own social science research and analyze data using statistical software. The aim of the course is to allow students to conduct elementary statistical analyses on their own and become critical readers of statistical evidence.
SOCI-231 Criminology
This course focuses on the historical and theoretical development of the major approaches to crime and criminality in the 20th and 21st centuries. Material discussed will include crime patterns, the formation of criminalized subgroups and how criminology relates to criminal justice policy. While focusing on social aspects of crime, we will ask: what makes people commit crimes? How do social policies impact criminal activity? How has our social construction of punishment changed over time?
SOCI-234 Social Problems
This is a course on the social construction of social problems. It devotes almost exclusive attention to how a 'problem' becomes a social problem; examining how atypical cases become regarded as typical; how definitions are expanded to inflate statistics; and how claim makers and advocacy groups manipulate the media to market social problems and solutions to the public.
SOCI-239 How Capitalism Works: Social Class, Power, and Ideology
The Occupy movement protests and recent popular uprisings across developing countries draw attention to rising global economic inequality. This course asks, "How does capitalism produce and reproduce economic inequality both within and across nations?" Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, we will examine class relations as a way to explain the unequal distribution of wealth and power. We will also discuss the role of the state and ideology in perpetuating the gap between the rich and poor. Students will learn the social dynamics underlying a range of contemporary issues in advanced and developing economies, ranging from labor exploitation to unemployment and financial crises.
SOCI-240 Collective Behavior and Social Movements
This course examines instances of organized collective action in social, historical, and empirical contexts, from the labor movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the new social movements of today. We also explore various forms of unstructured protest, such as riots and demonstrations.
SOCI-295 Independent Study
SOCI-316 Special Topics in Sociology
SOCI-316AG Special Topics in Sociology: 'Society of Algorithms'
We live in a society described by massive data sets, dynamically organized by computer code. New divisions of digital labor align complex data infrastructures while mathematical optimization continues to expand actuarial logics of decision-making. Algorithms also mediate the social communication of networked publics in ways that transform our social selves and social interaction. This research seminar asks: How do we understand the institutional nature of a society of algorithms?
SOCI-316DG Special Topics in Sociology: 'Sociology of Development and Globalization'
This course investigates economic development and globalization through a sociological lens. What is development? Why and how has the idea of development changed over time? Which development policies has this promoted, and with what consequences on people's lives in developing countries? Based on case studies across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, the course examines economic, political, and institutional factors that inform global development processes from post-WWII to the present. As we discuss challenges to the neoliberal development paradigm, students will gain a critical perspective on contemporary issues such as environmental damage, global inequality, and poverty.
SOCI-316EC Special Topics in Sociology: 'Ethnography of Crime'
What can ethnography reveal about the nature of crime and the functioning of criminal justice institutions? What contributions has ethnography made to the study of crime? What place does ethnography occupy within the contemporary landscape of criminology? These questions serve as the point of departure for this reading-intensive seminar investigating classic and contemporary ethnographic texts addressing crime and criminal justice institutions.
SOCI-316EE Special Topics in Sociology: 'Ethnographic Engagement and Practice'
This course situates ethnography as an engaged practice, and asks, how can scholars turn community engagement into formal research? With an emphasis on observation and community-based learning, this course requires time spent off campus in a domain of community-recognized need. Using a grounded theoretical perspective cultivated across the semester, students will build an actualizable research proposal as a final course product. Students will develop sociological observation skills, learn to structure and differentiate in-depth interviews for targeted audiences, and integrate community-driven insights into professional writing. At the same time, students will gain deeper insight into the meanings of need held in the local community, the likes of which are vital to creating participant-centered research and social change.
SOCI-316FN Special Topics in Sociology: 'Finance, Globalization, and Inequality'
We live in a financialized world dominated by financial actors, markets and institutions. From the Occupy Wall Street movement to ongoing debates about the power of big banks, finance has been seen as the culprit for the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. income and wealth inequality, and global instability. But what explains the rise of finance and how has finance gone global? How does global finance contribute to inequality within and across nations? We will tackle these questions by covering some of the recent sociological research on finance and financial globalization. Students will examine the political and institutional roots of financialization and its consequences in advanced and developing economies.
SOCI-316LT Special Topics in Sociology: 'The New American Elite'
Inequality in the United States is at levels not seen since the 1920s, yet we know relatively little about those at the top who've accumulated enormous wealth and power. This course is a critical study of American Elites. Who are they? How did they amass such staggering resources? How are these resources used in the political, economic, and social spheres to reproduce/enhance their privilege? We put contemporary American elites into historical perspective, interrogate their origins, and evaluate the networks and practices that distinguish them from everyone else. We also analyze the narratives used to justify their privilege and consider their potential for group solidarity and collective action
SOCI-316MX Special Topics in Sociology: 'Marxist Theory: Revolution and Critique'
Marxist social theory has been and continues to be a powerful intellectual influence throughout the globe. Yet Marxist social theory is far from unified, as it has proliferated into a bewildering number of perspectives that are sometimes at odds with each other. This course will explore some of these different versions of Marxism. We will begin with brief excerpts from the revolutionary writings of Lenin and Mao, and then examine examples from Black Marxism, Marxist feminism, the Frankfurt School, critiques of capitalist realism, and degrowth communism, among other perspectives. We will also read selections from some of the more sophisticated critics of Marxism, such as Michael Oakeshott and Hannah Arendt.
SOCI-316NQ Special Topics in Sociology: 'Organizations and Inequality'
In Organizations and Inequality, we analyze how organizations create, reproduce, and also potentially challenge social inequalities. Drawing on different organizational perspectives, students will engage the challenges of ethical action in a complex world marked by competing rationalities and deep inequalities. Students will also research an organization of which they are a member and develop their own case study.
SOCI-316PS Special Topics in Sociology: 'Digital Media and the Public Sphere'
How do different kinds of stories unfold in contemporary public spheres? How do we make sense of pressing matters of common concern as members of publics? This research seminar asks: what are the effects of a pervasive cultural distrust in social institutions, the widespread mediatization of everyday life, and the intercultural and intertextual nature of media texts themselves? Drawing from foundational texts about media, the role of intellectuals, and the public sphere, students will be asked to develop an empirical case study to explore these questions and test their ideas.
SOCI-316RM Special Topics in Sociology: 'Consumer Culture: Race in the Marketplace'
This course looks at the central concerns of consumer culture through the lens of race and ethnicity. Through exploring issues such as multicultural marketing and advertising, discrimination in e-commerce, consumer boycotts, and urban food deserts, students will gain theoretical and empirical insight on the ways that racial and ethnic boundaries shape, and are shaped by, consumption.
SOCI-316ST Special Topics in Sociology: 'Storytelling Sociology: Data for the People'
How can we communicate social science knowledge to the wider public? How can we interpret, and assess the quality of, social scientific sources? In this writing-intensive seminar, students will build data literacy and public writing skills to translate important social scientific findings to wider audiences. In a workshop-style model that maps the process of publication, students will create a long-form story that they may seek to publish in wider news outlets. Embedded within is a continuous exploration of social science communication ethics: what is the anticipated impact of publication on marginalized groups? What responsibility do writers carry of audience understandings?
SOCI-316SY Special Topics in Sociology: 'The Business of Culture: Marketing & Selling Symbolic Goods'
This course investigates the creative economy through a sociological lens. Through case studies of various creative industries, as well as examination of the creative sector as a whole, we will examine how the cultural economy influences, and is influenced by, social phenomena. We will explore issues such as how value is produced in the field of fashion modeling, how music and other creative industries drive urban economies, how local crafts enter global markets, and how norms and values influence the adoption of e-commerce in the market for fine art.
SOCI-316TX Special Topics in Sociology: 'Text as Data II: Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences'
How can the social sciences benefit from remarkable advances in hardware and software that have unlocked new approaches to using text-as-data? This course interrogates the use of text-as-data from both social scientific and computational perspectives. Students will consider how meaning and context are theorized and how scale is achieved in the analysis of text by social scientists and computational experts. This new frontier will be explored in a hands-on manner; by the end of the course, students will deploy machine learning models to gain insights from large bodies of text such that we may evaluate the utility of these approaches in our quest for insight into the social world.
SOCI-316VN Special Topics in Sociology: 'Violence and Intimacy'
What makes violences "intimate"? And how are the most private experiences of violence also collective ones? This course examines how seemingly private violences - such as intimate partner violence - come to be defined as public problems. Students will analyze how collective violences are intimately experienced and how intimate violences are collective issues. In our sociological examination of violence, we will trace the connections between the intimate and the collective, the historical and the present, the interpersonal and the structural to answer our initial questions of how to define violence, intimacy, and intimate violences. We will conclude by examining responses and solutions that have been enacted to prevent abuse and will imagine futures without violence.
SOCI-316VU Special Topics in Sociology: 'Visual Sociology: What Images Tell Us'
From A.I.-generated art to selfies, images saturate contemporary social life. This course investigates visual imagery through the lens of sociology. In particular, it focuses on how sociologists engage with visual material in the study of society. Students will examine how sociologists use images to build and evaluate theory, create new concepts, and display their findings. Students will also explore methodological approaches sociologists draw on to incorporate images as a source of data.
SOCI-317 Topics in Contemporary Social Thought
SOCI-317ST Topics in Contemporary Social Thought: 'Cultural Sociology and Contemporary Theory'
This seminar examines topics in cultural sociology and contemporary social theory. The first part of the class asks: How do we imagine social things? The second part of the class reviews the history of social theory with a focus on the multiple crises of the modernity narrative, and various attempts to resolve these crises. The final third of the class poses the question of how to analyze culture and "do" social theory.
SOCI-333 Contemporary Social Theory
In this critical survey of the main theoretical perspectives in contemporary sociology, we focus specifically on structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, critical theory, feminism, and postmodernism. Besides gaining familiarity with these alternative perspectives, we try to identify the main axes of theoretical dispute in sociology and discuss the problems of evaluating and resolving conflict between theories.
SOCI-395 Independent Study
