Class Schedules

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

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course focuses on disability rights and justice activism to highlight how disability movements contest expert authority, with particular attention to the tensions between parents and disabled children. We will consider ableism and disability as forms of social meaning-making that work within larger systems of power, privileging some and excluding others. In this course we approach the study of dis/abled bodyminds 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. By understanding disability 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 disability 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:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course examines how “reality” is created, maintained, and transformed through social interaction. Drawing on sociological theory and research, students will examine how individuals and groups collectively create the realities that shape identity, knowledge, and everyday experience. Key topics include symbolic interactionism, the social construction of self and society, language and meaning, media and representation, and the influence of power and inequality on what is accepted as “real.” Students will leave the course understanding that reality is not merely observed but continuously produced and negotiated within social contexts.

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

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-that is, the approach to social science research that entails statistically analyzing relatively large datasets and emphasizes concerns such as measurement, replicability, objectivity, generalizability, and causal inference. However, this methodological approach is not without its critics. Therefore, this course begins by being in conversation with quantitative social science's critics, examining the abuse of quantitative knowledge in social science research and how quantitative social scientists have themselves been complicit in building many of the tools now at the center of contemporary ethical debates over online privacy, digitization, facial recognition, AI, and their use in policing, surveillance, and border enforcement. Taking the stance that quantitative methods are tools with the capacity to either build up or break down social structures, we will work with municipal data from the City of Minneapolis to explore how quantitative methods may be, in sociologist Ruha Benjamin's words, "retooled" to serve emancipatory and abolitionist purposes. Readings will focus on case studies from social science research and critical texts from science and technology studies. Methods-training content will specifically entail the use of R and will cover inferring population characteristics from survey samples, estimating causality and predicting outcomes using linear regression, the principles of probability and estimating statistical uncertainty, and how to critically read quantitative information presented via figures and tables.

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 this course, we apply a sociological perspective to examine and critique consumerism, considering the possibilities for sustainability within consumption-oriented U.S. society. The course will consider how consumption structures and reproduces social difference, the role of consumer practices in the constitution of identity, belonging and leisure, the role of marketing and advertising, the problem of platform decay, branding and embodied consumer display, and solidarity economies. The course explores what the possibilities are within and beyond capitalist consumer culture for creating a socially and environmentally sustainable future.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course, we examine the social construction of the gender binary and its weaponization. How has bodily autonomy been constrained because of gendered hierarchy, and how has that oppression been resisted? Cases we will consider will include access to abortion and hysterectomy as well as the politics of feeding infants. We will think through play and deep care as means of providing belonging in a world structured by gendered hierarchy, as well as how these practices have challenged and provided alternatives to gender injustices in the family, intimate relationships, and medicine.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

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

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:
Writing WP
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

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