Class Schedules

The course introduces students to the sociological imagination, or "the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individual and society, of biography and history, of self and the world," as C. Wright Mills described it. The enduring value of a sociological imagination is to help students situate peoples' lives and important events in broader social contexts by understanding how political, economic, and cultural forces constitute social life. Sociology explores minute aspects of social life (microsociology) as well as global social processes and structures (macrosociology). Topics covered vary from semester to semester, but may include: socialization, suburbanization and housing, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class stratification, deviance and crime, economic and global inequality, families and intimate relationships, education, religion, and globalization.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The Far Right in the United States has appropriated working class identities to produce an identity among the white working class. Donald Trump, for instance, intentionally portrays a large gap in highbrow and lowbrow to take jabs at privileged liberals (such as when he tweeted the "Hamberder" photo). This course observes what can be called the Far Right "theater of politics" in order to understand how liberals have left working class culture behind in ways that allowed the far right to fill the void by finding persuasive techniques in culture (country music, religion, church...) to articulate a political voice that some working class folks, especially whites, may find appealing. Some of the major questions of the course include: (1) How do political and economic elites produce class, gender, and racial divides and segmentations by aligning themselves with the cultural practices often associated with working class folks? (2) Can the left create a political culture that cultivates respect for organic cultural expressions that include religious expressions and pop-cultural themes like country music and sports (yes, even football!) into their fold  Reducing everything to class and asking all others to submit to its political logic is a limited vision. Instead, the course investigates whether it is possible to envision a political project that rather than privileging the concerns of upper-middle class whites produces a culture of resistance that can articulate working class subjects - straight, queer, white, black, binary, non-binary - into a populist left movement? One of the truly powerful features of the Left is that it is much more diverse than the Far Right. Is it possible to extend that diversity even further so that it can show a "little respect" for organic cultural producers to feel comfortable producing and living in multiple class, racial, gender, and sexual habitus?

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Writing WA
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What is sociology and how can it be used to more deeply understand the significance of the Twin Cities? Blending material from urban studies and introductory sociology and applying them to the local context, this course challenges students to develop their own “sociological imaginations” by reflecting on how their personal biographies have been shaped by larger socio-historical forces. Applying key theories and concepts from the field like social constructionism, stratification, social solidarity, social control, rationalization, and forms of capital to sites and histories throughout Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the course takes a community-engaged approach to invite students to develop a more mindful and informed relationship to the region’s ongoing histories and political struggles—as well as their place within them.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces students to comparative and historical methods used in the social sciences, most prominently but by no means exclusively in sociology and political science. Comparative-historical researchers use huge comparisons to understand big structures and large processes that have immense importance for social life. The course addresses questions such as: How do social scientists gather and analyze evidence about macrosocial phenomena? What types of logic guide the definition and selection of cases? In addition, we learn about analytical choices facing comparative-historical researchers, including different methods of comparison and analysis of historical evidence. Beyond reading and discussing material about comparative-historical methods, we will analyze examples of research and apply lessons we learn to gain more familiarity with using comparative-historical methods.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores how sex, gender, and sexuality as categories of knowledge and being have been culturally formed and socially negotiated within colonial structures. Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing from perspectives such as sociology, history, feminist theory, queer of color critique, geography, legal studies, and cultural studies, the course delves into the role of sex, gender, and sexuality in shaping both imperial governance and status-based relations of exploitation. Tracing the transformation of sexual and gender ideologies amidst shifting colonial landscapes, it largely covers the transnational emergence of Victorian ideals of domestic propriety, gender binarism, and legal-medical authority alongside property privatization and capitalist industrialization from the 15th through the early 20th centuries. Additionally, the course examines how topics related to sex, gender and sexuality in the contemporary context exist in continuity with this colonial inheritance. A reading-intensive seminar with expectations of high student participation in group discussions, students will examine topics such as the feminization of labor and poverty, neoliberalism as neocolonialism, gendered and sexual violence, the nexus of war and torture, the carceral state and family abolitionism, border securitization and surveillance, land back/the politics of decolonization, and transnational feminist movements. Meets the Internationalism GE requirement.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Economic activity is a form of social activity: people attribute meaning to economic activity, they pursue such activity in relation to others, and this activity is patterned and organized. Starting from these premises, economic sociologists ask a wide range of questions, such as: How do people find jobs? What historical and social legacies affect prospects for development? How do art dealers know how to set prices on unique original works of art? What social arrangements influence economic inequalities? In what ways do people mix economic activities and intimacy? By surveying recent developments in economic sociology, this course introduces students to the kinds of questions that economic sociologists ask, the types of evidence they use, and the range of answers they generate. Students do not need a background in economics or sociology for this course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Why are there large-scale health inequalities? While many popular accounts emphasize differences in individual bodies or behavior, this course examines how social processes affect individuals, populations, and their health, placing special emphasis on stigma and discrimination. We study theories that account for the ways that stigma and discrimination can act as social determinants of health, examine research that seeks to isolate the ways that stigma and discrimination can affect health and health disparities, and use this material to think creatively about potential solutions to health inequalities.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores the historical and contemporary politics and lived experience of Palestine as a land, a state, and a population. We will cover the history of the conflict from the rise of Zionism and resistance to it, including both Palestinian resistance and the contemporary voices of dissenting American Jews. Discussions will center Israel's continued territorial expansion and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Students will learn and apply concepts such as biopolitics, necropolitics, and more, in the context of Israel’s historical and contemporary policies, and will analyze the United States’ regional role. Through close engagement with primary and secondary sources, students will develop the ability to critically assess policy strategies, regional power dynamics, and the historical forces that continue to shape one of the most contested regions in the modern world. The course draws on a range of scholarly sources, including works by scholars, critics, and international analysts, complemented by documentary media and guest presentations.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Often portrayed as the nation’s white heartland, the American Midwest is far more diverse than its popular image suggests. Latine histories in the region date back to the late nineteenth century, when workers labored in the cattle and railroad industries; by the twentieth century, migrant laborers had become vital to the Heartland’s agricultural, meatpacking, and railroad economies. In recent decades, the Latine population has grown from 1.3 million in 1980 to 6 million in 2020, shaping the cultural, social, and economic fabric of both rural towns and major Midwestern cities. This course draws on the frameworks of transnational migration and placemaking to provide a critical examination of Latin American migration to the Midwest. Combining insights from the social sciences and the humanities, we will explore how immigrants create home, build community, and articulate Latinidad in spaces often imagined as culturally homogeneous. Through literature, film, and scholarly works, the course foregrounds the voices of immigrants and their descendants as they navigate displacement, cultural negotiation, and the ongoing work of placemaking in a region marked by both exclusion and renewal. While we analyze how immigration policies and social structures shape these experiences, we will pay particular attention to stories, cultural practices, and public performances through which Latine communities claim visibility and agency. A community engagement component deepens our understanding. In partnering with local organizations such as El Colegio, Centro, CLUES, and COPAL MN, students will connect course readings to the lived realities of Latine immigrants, learning not only from texts but from direct participation in cultural and community initiatives across the Twin Cities. Engagement with the International Festival of Minnesota allows students to study the ethnic diversity within the Latine community in the Twin Cities, whether recently arrived or long established, and how they construct their ethnic identity through performance for the larger society.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This senior seminar serves as the capstone experience for sociology majors. This class provides students with an opportunity to develop a synthetic understanding of their sociology course work and to conduct prospective research that may culminate in honors projects.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

How does something become accepted as “real”? Why do certain ideas, categories, identities, and institutions seem natural or inevitable, even though they are created and maintained by people? In this course, we will examine how social reality is produced, negotiated, and reproduced through everyday interaction, shared meanings, institutions, and systems of power. We will explore how people create meaning through social interaction and how those meanings become taken for granted as common sense, while learning about various approaches (symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, and the sociology of knowledge) that seek to explain these processes. We will also consider how power shapes whose definitions of reality become accepted, whose experiences are marginalized or challenged, and how seemingly natural categories and practices can change over time. Ultimately, the course invites students to question what appears obvious, examine how it came to be, and consider how social realities might be constructed differently.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course, which has no prerequisites, examines the deep structural crisis of the entire edifice of a historical system that we have lived under for multiple centuries. The course title reflects a predicament described by Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s, but that may be more salient today: "'the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old order is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The morbid symptoms of our own old order can be seen in the severe and increasing inequality. The two beneficiaries of this system are (1) those who are at the apex of the system, the so-called 1% and (2) the highly-educated elite professionals, intellectuals, and managerial class, the next 9% and sometimes called the clergy or the secular high priests of the system. The remaining population, largely composed of less educated whites, minorities, blacks, and women are being further and further removed from the rewards of the system. This hyper-inegalitarian system of rule is now experiencing a legitimacy crisis by both the far right and the left, but no true alternatives have yet been proposed to reform or replace it. The far right wants to take us on a path of racial white supremacist rule and further escalate inequalities and prepare us for possibly even a more sinister form of a postcapitalist society. The far left, on the other hand, wants to create a system of radical democracy and respect for nature that has the potential for replacing capitalism with a new historical system based on a more just foundation. This course will identify what was historically in place, capitalism's distinctive dynamics so that we may better determine what is needed to resolve it. With that in mind, we need to seek a path forward that leads beyond the current impasse -- through political realignments to societal transformation. We will explore what this capitalist system is, how it functioned historically, where it is now, and what systems may replace it in the future. To cover all that in one course is exciting and may help us think about some possible futures we can begin to imagine and work toward.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Differently positioned groups and individuals in society experience and understand historical occurrences from distinct standpoints. What becomes the accepted account of what has transpired in our collective lives? How do we as a society remember and make sense of the past? What types of knowledge get produced when only certain accounts of history make their way into official repositories? How is the past ordered and tamed? These questions orient us toward the study of “collective memory,” a concept coined by early sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1925 to refer to how memory becomes significant once taken up in a social context. With a focus on placing the United States in global perspective, we will cover a wide range of theoretical readings from Jacques Derrida to Avery Gordon to Lisa Yoneyama and will examine material such as video testimonies, museum displays, archival collections, public monuments, and news coverage to consider the relationship between power and knowledge, the place of history in contemporary political struggles, and the role of technology in historical preservation. Putting into practice what C. Wright Mills defined as the "sociological imagination’s ability to see “the interplay of…biography and history, of self and world,” the course centers around students completing a critical-creative project reflecting on their own lives in relation to the course material.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores historical and contemporary perspectives on racial and ethnic groups in American society, including African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, European Americans, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent. The goal is to develop an understanding of socio-historical forces that have shaped the lives of racial and ethnic groups in America.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course focuses on reproductive health as a human right following the reproductive justice framework. It will focus on women and how they navigate the system to expand their rights. The course will pay particular attention to women who are marginalized due to their race, class, gender identity, indigeneity, and religion. In doing so, this course studies reproductive health and human rights in relation to the broader structural context in the Americas (e.g. national laws and international conventions). As the topic of women's reproductive rights is vast, we will be focusing on abortion, domestic violence, and motherhood. Students in the class will study these issues from the perspective of women's organizations that have mobilized to expand reproductive rights. This course will be comparative in nature as it will focus on reproductive rights in the U.S. and Latin America from the 1980s onwards. These two regions are intimately connected politically and economically, and in regards to reproductive rights. For example, the gag rule introduced by the Reagan administration in 1984 jeopardized the reproductive health services provided in Latin American countries that received funding from the U.S. government. Yet another way that these two regions have been coupled is through feminist networks that have been working to expand reproductive rights in the Americas.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Social scientists have many methodological approaches to choose from in their research toolkit ranging from qualitative to quantitative to comparative historical. Each of these approaches allows us to see and understand society from different perspectives, sometimes offering us complementary snapshots and other times presenting us with contradictory information. How, then, can we engage evidence to make claims about the social world? What even counts as evidence and who gets to speak for whom? Social Science Inquiry is part of a methods training sequence that emphasizes quantitative social science inquiry. The course covers quantitative social science as an epistemology compared to other ways of knowing, engages with published quantitative work in the field as well as its critics, teaches the basics of quantitative analysis for the social sciences, and largely emphasizes a hands-on approach to conceptualizing and implementing a research project. Also covering themes related to research ethics, these topics will be approached from a non-extractive lens, emphasizing the need to situate our research in the needs, obligations, and relations asked of us by the broader community. Note: The course uses R and counts as a Q3 and WA requirement.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Quantitative Thinking Q3

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course is designed to engage students with the most sophisticated and useful schools of thought available in the social science disciplines. The course raises a number of questions: How can we best understand the complexities of self and society? Are these units of analysis useful in and of themselves? Are they contained in an essential body or polity that we can identify as some unitary entity called Jenny and John Doe, American, French, Arab/Jew, black/white, modern/primitive, developed/underdeveloped, Oriental/ Occidental, homo/heterosexual, male/female? Or are they socially produced units that have no essence in-of-themselves, produced and made real only through performance with the "Other"? Furthermore, is there something unique about modernity that has fundamentally transformed the notions of our selves, bodies, polities, races, and civilizations? If the answer to the last question is in the affirmative, how and why did this come to be the case, and what consequences does it hold for our understanding of the past and of the future? These are the kinds of questions that great figures in sociology have been asking since the nineteenth-century, including classic theorists like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, as well as more recent writers such as Ervin Goffman, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Edward Said.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

During the last three decades, a global indigenous rights movement has taken shape within the United nations and other international bodies, challenging and reformulating international law and global cultural understandings of indigenous rights. The recognition of indigenous peoples' rights in international law invokes the tensions between sovereignty and human rights, but also challenges the dominant international understandings of both principles. In this course, we examine indigenous peoples' movements by placing them in a global context and sociologically informed theoretical framework. By beginning with a set of influential theoretical statements from social science, we will then use indigenous peoples' movements as case studies to examine the extent to which these theoretical perspectives explain and are challenged by case studies. We will then analyze various aspects of indigenous peoples' movements and the extent to which these aspects of the movement are shaped by global processes.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Exploring a wide range of issues that have converged in the suburbs as arguably the most important spatial form of the 20th century, this course takes an urban sociological approach to understanding the social life and political economy of the areas that sit at the fringe of metro centers. Topics covered include: the history of the city vis-à-vis the suburb, the allure and deceit of media representations of the American Dream, the spatial and possessive logics of whiteness, the political sway of the suburban homeowner, the social control features of suburban architecture and the surrounding built environment, and suburbs in global/transnational perspective. With thematic units emphasizing the role of the streetcar and department store and later the highway and shopping mall in facilitating settlement and expansion, the course takes a community-engaged approach by inviting students to visit locations across the Twin Cities that illustrate the story of the area’s own suburbanization, including Dayton’s department store, Southdale Center, and the Mall of America. Theorizing together about the significance of rejecting the “cruel optimism” of the suburbs amidst the recapture of city centers by the forces of financialized capital, the course broadly asks what it means to be in place and in community in a world where space has become increasingly territorialized, privatized, and hoarded.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Law is omnipresent in contemporary social life. How should we understand this development and its consequences? How does law operate to the advantage or disadvantage of various members of society? Can law be the source of significant social change? This course examines the development of a formal, legal system and the ways in which such a system connects to other parts of society. We begin by focusing on individual experiences and understandings of law and what these tell us about how law fits into the larger social order. We then evaluate explanations about the connections between social and legal development. We also consider how the "law in action" operates by examining empirical studies of legal institutions and the limits and potential of law as a source for social change.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This class focuses on the relationship between families and larger social institutions, including governments, economic institutions, and labor markets. This course also explores how various societal forces shape relationships within contemporary American families, as well as considering other historical forms and understandings of the family.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials