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

This course responds to the decades-long call from disability scholars and activists for an approach to disability that moves away from the medical model of individual deficit or defect to understanding ableism and disability instead as forms of social meaning-making that work within larger systems of power, privileging some and marginalizing others. In this course we will work with the social model of disability, 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 disability justice activism. 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

How do people decide who gets into college? Does everyone go to college for the same reasons? How does college shape who we are, who we become? In recent years, sociologists have been increasingly interested in the social processes that are particular to college and university life. In this class, we will explore the process of college–from admission to graduation–with a sociological lens. These discussions will include topics such as how we make friends in college, gendered dimensions of hookup culture, the impact of campus diversity initiatives, and the financial pressures of college life. Throughout the semester we will examine case studies across a variety of institution types with the aim of reflecting on the Macalester experience and gaining perspective on both the particular and the general social processes associated with being in college.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

According to the International Organization for Migration (OIM), in 2019, the United States had the largest foreign-born population in the world. During the same year, immigrants represented 15% of the United States population while 53% of the foreign-born migrants came from Latin America. At the same time, we are observing the securitization of the US-Mexico border that is resulting in the removal of undocumented individuals from the U.S. in large numbers, specifically Latino men. The course examines recent U.S. immigration as part of a global (historical) phenomenon to understand how we got to where we are. While we will become familiar with immigration policies, we will pay attention to the experiences of immigrants, particularly those coming from Latin America. We will explore questions such as: What motivates people to migrate? How does migration reconfigure social relations, such as parental and community relations? This is a discussion-based course and includes guest speakers and a civic engagement project with a local organization.

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

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

Is Russia a lawless state? Does China care about anyone’s rights? Is the United States careening towards a future of authoritarianism? In recent years, policymakers, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals have referenced the emergence of political phenomena such as Brexit, and the popularity of personalities such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin (Russia), Viktor Orban (Hungary), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) as evidence of a global wave of democratic decline. Simultaneously, conversations among the American political left about the strength of the courts as institutions that protect democracy in the U.S. seem to have heightened. But, to what extent can one really expect judicial behavior to influence the reach of state power? This course will explore examples of authoritarian legality from around the world to help students develop new understandings about how to contextualize the sources and limits of judicial power in the current global political climate.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What does it mean to say that we live in an unequal world? From inequalities between countries to inequalities between people, our societies are characterized by deep global and interpersonal fissures across which both resources like wealth and prestige and opportunities for mobility and safety are unequally distributed. To understand the varied ways we have unequally structured our society, this course provides an overview of sociological and multidisciplinary approaches to answering questions like: What accounts for global and local patterns of inequality? How is inequality related to a person’s race, class, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of social identity? What social practices perpetuate the ongoing reproduction of inequality? How is inequality embodied and lived? And, further, what does striving for a world without inequality look like when we have inherited the legacy of this already unequal world? Building on these course materials, students critically engage with thematic units on inequality in housing, schools, work, the family, and the criminal legal system through creative assignments, ultimately working together to contemplate what solidarities are necessary to contest both structural and relational forms of inequality in our social world.

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

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:

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
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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