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:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The use of imprisonment as a form of criminal punishment is only about as old at the United States. Currently, 1 in 100 adults in the United States are in prison or jail. How should we understand the growth of this form of criminal punishment? How is it similar to other methods to react to and to attempt to control unwanted behavior? What are the social consequences of these formal institutions of social control? In this course, we examine these developments in the processes and organization of social control, paying particular attention to criminal behavior and formal, legal responses to crime. We study and evaluate sociological theories of criminal behavior to understand how social forces influence levels of crimes. We examine recent criminal justice policies in the United States and their connections to inequality, examining the processes that account for expanding criminalization. Finally, we compare the development of formal, bureaucratic systems of social control and informal methods of social control, paying attention to the social and political implications of these developments.

General Education Requirements:
Quantitative Thinking Q2
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course provides students with a critical perspective in interpreting social inequalities in the United States. The objective of the course is to provide students with sophisticated sociological studies dealing with social inequalities. The course attempts to demonstrate that even though our meritocratic ideals can be empowering tools to live by, there are social forces at work that impact the opportunities available to individuals located at different levels of the social hierarchy. We will dive deeply into the sociological imagination to explore structural aspects of inequalities. This class requires frequent writing assignments connected to the readings. Also, this class will largely be discussion based with some sprinkling of lectures.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
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 “theatre 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, find appealing. Some of the major questions of the course include: (1) How do political and economic elites like Madison Avenue and politicians produce class, gender, and racial divides and segmentations? (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 left 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 that can persuasively defeat this emerging Far right? 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:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What is social about sexuality? Sexuality and its components (desire, pleasure, love, the body) is something more than a personal or individual characteristic. It is socially constructed. Sexuality has been configured during different historical time periods as sin, as a means of fostering alliances between powerful families, as perversion, as a means to pleasure, as a symbol of love, and as personal identity. These different sexual configurations are connected with larger social-historical trends such as the development of capitalism, the use of rationalized technologies, and the expansion of scientific-medical discourse. In this course, we explore how sexuality has been constructed through history. We examine how categories shape our understanding of sexuality such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual/queer. We also will address issues such as child sexuality, prostitution, images of sexual minorities in the media and heteronormativity.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course is focused and driven by student team project work. Students will prioritize social problems / issues for which they would like to engage in the creation / implementation of a solution. They will spend the semester working to more deeply understand the problems, research successful and failed attempts to resolve the problem in other contexts, and to generate a solution that includes a well researched model for introducing sustainable social change. It is through this engagement that students will grapple with the challenging realities of practice and implementation. Students will study several methodologies including Lean Startup, Human Centered Design, Participatory Poverty Assessment and Impact Gap Analysis. Students will learn through their own experiences and utilize case studies comparing problems, their root causes and the entrepreneurial approaches deployed to address them from various countries and cultural contexts.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The course introduces students to principles of cross-national and cross-cultural analysis. The class begins with a survey of the basic methodological orientations that distinguish various modes of analysis in the social sciences. The lectures and discussions in this section provide a general introduction to the logic of causal analysis, explore the relative strengths and weaknesses of differing methodological approaches to understanding social phenomena, and specifically, consider in greater detail the distinctive blend of theoretical, methodological, and empirical concerns that inform comparative-historical social science. The substantive topics of the course include: the Social Origins of the Modern State; the Sociology of Democracy and Authoritarianism; the Sociology of Revolution; and The Rise of the Welfare State.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course applies a sociological perspective to examine consumer culture in American society. The course covers a range of topics, including how consumption structures and reproduces social difference, the role of consumer practices in the constitution of personal identity, sociability and leisure, the role of marketing and advertising, branding and embodied consumer display, and the location of consumption as a site of sub-cultural resistance. The course also explores the troubled relationship between consumerism and sustainability, assessing the possibilities within consumer culture for creating a sustainable future.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course we will explore the frameworks, concepts and theories developed by sociologists for understanding the nature and dynamics of social movements through exploring cases of social movements in 20th and 21st century U.S. history. We will be applying sociological approaches to these cases, exploring different facets of collective action. We will examine why and how movements emerge as well as the strategies and tactics of those movements. In the course we will cover a wide range of movements, such as the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, feminist movements, the gay liberation movement, as well as the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements.

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

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

We have seen a burst of writing and thinking about men in the past several decades. Many of these writings argue that as more women are excelling professionally, earning more college degrees than their male counterparts and acting as the family breadwinner, the traditional gender landscape is quickly fading into what they identify as a matriarchy. According to this view, men, having falling from their privileged place in society, are being out competed by women for the most prestigious occupations and are now becoming emasculated in the process. We will critically explore the debate that this perspective has engendered, looking at not only the facts of whether this is true or not, but the cultural anxieties and fantasies such a perceived closure of the alpha male trope has produced. We will begin with the idea that manhood has a history, that it is a human creation rather than an edict from above or from nature. Some of the key questions we will ask are: How has manhood changed in the United States since the 19th century? Are there different forms of masculinities, especially when we take into account social indicators like class, race, and ethnicity? Can masculinity take on chameleon forms that in the past seemed antithetical to masculinity, like geeks, cosmopolitans, metrosexuals, or in upper-class gentlemanly cultures? Are we experiencing an emerging hybrid or inclusionary forms of masculinities or are these simply a repackaging of the old?

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

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course, we will study contemporary food issues, ranging in scale from the global food system to family dinners. We will use food and foodways as a vehicle for exploring systemic, institutional, and interpersonal power as expressed through the production, distribution, and consumption of food, with a focus on the United States. The course provides an overview of the conventional food system, then moves into examining key contemporary debates around food related to human health, social class and consumption, gender and carework, and the broader social and environmental ramifications of how we eat. By better understanding the relationships between power, privilege, and food, we can learn to recognize how people come to produce, consume, and identify with various aspects of food systems. We conclude by exploring how people are working to address food system issues in pursuit of the values of justice and sustainability and briefly explore possible alternative food futures.

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Social science presents claims about the social world in a particular manner that is centered on theoretical claims (explanations) supported by evidence. This course covers the methods through which social scientists develop emprically-supported explanations. The course covers three main sets of topics: the broad methodological questions posed by philosophy of social science, how social scientists develop research design to generate relevant evidence, and methods with which social scientists analyze data. For both the research design and analysis sections, we will concentrate on quantitative research, learning how to use statistical software.

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

In many contemporary social movements, the roles of race and class may either seem obvious or relatively easy to ascertain. But what happens when we add gender to this mix? What are the different roles that women take on in social movements and how can we account for differences across movements? How do gender, race, and class intersect in social movements? For example, what happens when we compare the ideas of progress in Black Lives Matter and white nationalist movements with particular emphasis on women’s place(s) in the future? In this course, we scrutinize the intersections of race, class, and gender as they relate to the ideals to which movements aspire. Social movements that emphasize concepts such as progress, development, and nation-making indicate visions of the future that can illuminate how gender, race, and class shape peoples’ lives. We will focus on the experiences of women (as individuals and as members of groups or organizations) in their historical and structural locations and explore what concepts such as progress, development, and nation-making mean for women in the struggle over feminist meanings and claims.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The innocence of childhood: where does this idea come from, and to whose children does it apply? This course provides an introduction to childhood studies, to sociological theories about youth agency, and to debates about how, why, and with what consequences the transition to adulthood has become stratified, scrambled, or only partially realized because of systems of inequality. We will consider what queer and trans childhoods can teach us about gender and sexuality as well as society more broadly. We will pay particular attention to how adoption and adoptees contribute to the understanding of “good” childhoods and the place of children within families across divisions of class, race, and nation.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course responds to the decades-long call from disability scholars and activists for an approach to dis/ability that moves away from the “medical model” of individual deficit and defect to understanding it instead as a form of social meaning-making that works within larger systems of power, privileging some and marginalizing others. In this course we will examine this “social model” of dis/ability, by approaching the study of dis/abled bodies (and minds) through the ever-shifting historical, socio-cultural, and political formations that name them as such. We will draw on classics of disability studies and emergent feminist sociological texts on disability, as well as memoir, personal essays, pop culture and current events and activism. By understanding dis/ability as a vector of privilege and oppression, we will analyze its intersections with other vectors of oppression, such as race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship. Although the course will focus on to dis/ability in the United States, we will do so by locating the U.S. transnationally within larger global economic, social and political systems.

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