SOCI 110-01 30610 |
Introduction to Sociology |
Days: M W F
|
Time: 09:40 am-10:40 am
|
Room: CARN 304
|
Instructor: Christina Hughes
|
Avail./Max.: 5 / 23
|
Details
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
|
SOCI 150-01 30611 |
Prius or Pickup? Political Divides and Social Class |
Days: M
|
Time: 07:00 pm-10:00 pm
|
Room: CARN 304
|
Instructor: Khaldoun Samman
|
Avail./Max.: 0 / 20
|
Details
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:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 175-01 30377 |
Sociolinguistics |
Days: M W F
|
Time: 09:40 am-10:40 am
|
Room: CARN 204
|
Instructor: Marianne Milligan
|
Avail./Max.: 3 / 20
|
*First day attendance required; cross-listed with LING 175-01*
Details
Sociolinguistics is the study of the social language variation inevitable in all societies, be they closed and uniform or diverse and multicultural. Language and culture are so closely tied that it is nearly impossible to discuss language variation without also understanding its relation to culture. As humans, we judge each other constantly on the basis of the way we use language, we make sweeping generalizations about people's values and moral worth solely on the basis of the language they use. Diversity in language often stands as a symbol of ethnic and social diversity. If someone criticizes our language we feel they are criticizing our inmost self. This course introduces students to the overwhelming amount of linguistic diversity in the United States and elsewhere, while at the same time making them aware of the cultural prejudices inherent in our attitude towards people who communicate differently from us. The class involves analysis and discussion of the readings, setting the stage for exploration assignments, allowing students to do their own research on linguistic diversity.
General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 194-01 30612 |
Children and Childhood in Times of Change and Crisis |
Days: M W F
|
Time: 10:50 am-11:50 am
|
Room: CARN 304
|
Instructor: Lisa Gulya
|
Avail./Max.: 2 / 20
|
Details
This course provides an introduction to the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies. We will question taken-for-granted assumptions about the child as we explore how understandings, representations, and experiences of childhood vary across historical, cultural, and geographical contexts. Examining the significance of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, gender identity, sexuality, and disability within children’s lives, we will consider the diverse experiences of childhood. Core themes include the social construction of childhood, children’s agency, and debates surrounding children’s rights in a global context. We will consider various case studies of contemporary children’s and youth issues, including growing up trans and what that reveals about society’s ideas about gender identity more broadly; how children cope and recover following disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and wildfires; and how children and youth can participate and lead in electoral politics and social movements. Finally, we will discuss contemporary research on how, why, and with what consequences the transition to adulthood has become stratified, scrambled, or only partially realized because of systems of oppression and privilege. These systems shape people’s opportunities in higher education, paid work, partnering, parenting, and living independently. Assignments will encourage students to bring a critical perspective to images and narratives of childhood.
General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 194-02 30613 |
Eat, Pay, Leave: Power and Politics of Food and Eating |
Days: W
|
Time: 07:00 pm-10:00 pm
|
Room: CARN 304
|
Instructor: Lisa Gulya
|
Avail./Max.: 2 / 20
|
Details
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, race and food production, 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. Throughout the course, we will explore how people are working to address food system issues in pursuit of the values of justice and sustainability through investigating lesser-known food cooperatives of the past and interrogating visions of possible food futures.
General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 194-03 30894 |
Symbols and Selves |
Days: T R
|
Time: 03:00 pm-04:30 pm
|
Room: MAIN 009
|
Instructor: Jesse Rude
|
Avail./Max.: 18 / 25
|
Details
How do we create meaning and order in our lives? How do we adopt, project and subvert identities? This introduction to microsociology explores how social reality is constructed through day-to-day interactions. Topics include self-development, impression management, identity transformation, gender play, rumor transmission, and collective action. We will learn more about these concepts by doing--students will conduct guided research projects (using qualitative methods) to address a topic of interest.
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 210-01 30614 |
Sociology of Sexuality |
Days: M W F
|
Time: 02:20 pm-03:20 pm
|
Room: CARN 304
|
Instructor: Lisa Gulya
|
Avail./Max.: 2 / 23
|
Details
What is social about sexuality? Sexuality and its components (desire, pleasure, love, the body) are more than personal or individual characteristics. Sexuality 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 children's sexuality, sex work, queer and trans representation in the media and heteronormativity.
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 269-01 30615 |
Social Science Inquiry |
Days: T R
|
Time: 09:40 am-11:10 am
|
Room: HUM 401
|
Instructor: Christina Hughes
|
Avail./Max.: -6 / 20
|
Details
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:
Quantitative Thinking Q3
Distribution Requirements:
Social science
Course Materials
|
SOCI 272-01 30616 |
Social Theories |
Days: M W F
|
Time: 01:10 pm-02:10 pm
|
Room: CARN 204
|
Instructor: Khaldoun Samman
|
Avail./Max.: -3 / 20
|
Details
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
|
SOCI 280-01 30734 |
Indigenous Peoples' Movements in Global Context |
Days: T R
|
Time: 03:00 pm-04:30 pm
|
Room: CARN 204
|
Instructor: Erik Larson
|
Avail./Max.: 13 / 20
|
*Cross-listed with INTL 280-01*
Details
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
|
SOCI 310-01 30618 |
Law and Society |
Days: T R
|
Time: 01:20 pm-02:50 pm
|
Room: CARN 204
|
Instructor: Erik Larson
|
Avail./Max.: 9 / 20
|
Details
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
|