What is Latinx futurism? Most of the imagined futures we are exposed to in the United States have been crafted by white authors. From Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novels about robots to high-production value blockbusters. An alternative cannon, Afrofuturism, has begun to blaze a path for understanding why the political, racial, and cultural position of those doing the imagining matters. In do so, Afrofuturism aims to inspire us to think carefully about how we deal with the pressing social issues of our time and have offered a new lens for thinking about the future. This discussion-based seminar takes this as a departure point and works towards including Latinx futurism in this frame. This seminar is an introduction to a way of thinking sociologically about technology, science, and society from the perspective of Latinx and Latin American communities. In their reading and writing assignments students will explore a broad array of topics, from the origins of postcolonial states, Zapotec science, and borderlands epistemology.
Sociology is a field of study that examines how people and groups interact, navigate, and make decisions within the structure and constraints of their social world. Often these social processes go unobserved or unacknowledged, and sociologists treat it as their job to shed analytical light on how people experience and participate in society. Through sociological analysis, we can answer questions like: How did Evanston become largely segregated by race? Why is it illegal for people to sell their kidneys? Is suicide contagious? Why would someone pay for Instagram followers?
Sociology is a huge field of study, and includes and enormous variety of topics and methods. Each week, we will focus on a specific area of sociological study (Culture, Gender, Race, Family, Money, Deviance, etc.) with the goal of offering you a general overview of the types of questions sociologists ask and how they answer them. By the end of the quarter, you will be able to think sociologically about your own world, and hopefully develop a budding interest in one or more of the areas we discuss in class.
The course is called Cities and Society but it's really about the whole metropolis. Urban areas are dense settlements of diverse groups of people. Racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, cultural, economic, and political heterogeneity all require negotiation and sometimes lead to conflicts that play out in the streets and neighborhoods of major metropolises. Also, elite political and financial actors in cities have a heavy hand in shaping the direction of urban development and the allocation of resources. We will look at the role of both institutional actors and average city residents in affecting the following urban issues: housing and residential stratification by race and class, city financing and economic development, poverty, zoning, crime and policing, health and wellness, education, culture, and immigration.
This class will explore the nature of race in an effort to understand exactly what race is. It seeks to understand why race is such a potent force in American society. Close attention will be paid to the relationship between race, power, and social stratification. The course will examine the nature of racial conflict and major efforts to combat racial inequality.
Our climate is rapidly changing. Rising sea levels and increasing ocean acidity, higher temperatures, more droughts, melting glaciers, wilder weather patterns, and mounting environmental disasters mean that climate change is increasingly visible in our daily lives. What role does human society play in these changes, and what consequences does society suffer as these changes occur? This course is an introduction to environmental sociology during which we will employ an intersectional, sociological perspective to look beyond the scientific basis for environmental problems to understand the social roots of environmental issues. We will cover a variety of topics in environmental sociology, including how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion and environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks. A primary, central focus of this sociology course is environmental inequality, and students engage with a wide range of theories to examine environmental issues of their own choosing. This is not a public policy course.
Gender structures our daily lives in fundamental ways, yet we are often unaware of its effects. For example, why do we associate blue with boys and pink with girls? Why do most administrative forms only have two categories (i.e. Male and Female)? Why do male doctors, on average, have higher incomes than female doctors? The course introduces students to the sociological analysis of gender as a central component of social organization and social inequality in the US context. We start by reviewing key sociological concepts that are important to the study of gender. Next, we explore the causes and consequences of gender inequalities in important social institutions such as the family, the education system, and the labor market. We conclude by considering gender inequality in an international comparative context to understand crosscutting similarities and differences between the US and both high- and low-income contexts. This allows us to explore the role social norms and policies play in perpetuating and/or mitigating gender inequalities.
Legal Studies Research Methods introduces students to research methods used in interdisciplinary legal studies, including jurisprudence and legal reasoning, qualitative and quantitative social science methods, and historical and textual analysis. The course is a prerequisite for the Advanced Research Seminar in Legal Studies, 398-1,- 2, and is intended to prepare students for the design of their own research project to be conducted in 398-1, -2. Through exposure to and engagement with interdisciplinary research methods on law and legal processes, the course will provide students with a deeper understanding of law in its historical and social context. The course will provide students with a set of research tools with which to conduct research on legal institutions. The course builds on content from Legal Studies 206/Sociology 206, a prerequisite for this course. While part of the Legal Studies major sequence, the course will enrich the analytic skills of students from many fields who are interested in law or in interdisciplinary research methods.
Prerequisite: LEGAL_ST 206/SOCIOL 206. Taught with LEGAL_ST 207; may not receive credit for both courses.
The topical focus of the course will be violence by the police and capital punishment in the United States. These topics will be explored with interdisciplinary readings and relevant legal cases. Students will be exposed to several research tools and research processes, as they also engage with material on police violence and capital punishment. In addition to shorter assignments, students will develop a research proposal on a topic of their choosing.
We all interact with organizations. You are interacting with an organization right now. Much of everyday life, whether it is school, work, shopping, or eating occurs within the context of organizations. The goal of this course is to teach you to think analytically about the organizations you interact with. We will examine why organizations are the way they are, how scholar's understandings of organizations have changed over time, and how scholars today think about organizations.
This is a class on economic sociology and like many other actions, economic action is just another form of social action. Economic sociology provides us with a different perspective on economic actions, and as such, it is helpful both academically and in our everyday lives. In class we will explore the foundations of economic sociological theory, as well as current research relevant for today’s economic social issues such as financialization, debt and recent changes in the economy. We will engage with research in the course readings as well as in class. The class will have several components such as a short lecture, discussion, group work and guided readings.
In this course, we will examine how the Western medical system and accompanying health practices impact people of different genders, as well as how healthcare as an institution and practice produces gender categories. Using interdisciplinary research with a focus on sociological studies, we will interrogate the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss health inequalities between women, men, and trans* people from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, using sociological research to understand why these inequalities and forms of difference emerge and are sustained. We will explore how modern Western medicine views male and female bodies and defines their health and illnesses accordingly. Students will complete two short research projects over the term in which they use different data sources (interviews and media content) to examine gendered perceptions of health, health behaviors, help-seeking behaviors, and experiences with medical institutions.
From abstinence-only sex education programs to the public response to songs like WAP by Cardi B & Megan thee Stallion, we are bombarded with messaging that sexuality is stigmatized. But why is sexuality so taboo? How do social forces shape the way we view, experience, and regulate sexuality? Using a sociological lens, this course explores the intersection of sexuality and stigma. We will begin by exploring foundational theories of both stigma and sexuality in the social sciences. Armed with these frameworks, we will then engage with in-depth case studies of different stigmatized sexualities, including homosexuality & bisexuality, asexuality, HIV/AIDS, infidelity, sex work, kink, ethical non-monogamy, and disabled sexualities. The course will empower students to interrogate their own assumptions and to critically examine the forces that perpetuate sexual inequality in society. By the end of the course, students will have gained a deeper understanding of how stigma operates at both the individual and structural level. The final assignment requires students to write a proposal for a research project that would answer a sociological question of their choice about stigma and sexuality.
Why, in moments of crisis, do some people distrust scientific experts while others embrace them? This course will begin to answer this question in three steps: First, we will unpack the tools that experts use to assert their authority and produce a binding perception of reality. Then, we will consider the way that social movements—including “citizen scientists,” HIV/AIDS activists, and “biohackers”—contest, mistrust, or reaffirm experts’ authority. Finally, we will study how these disputes are shaped by regulatory bureaucracies and the legal system. Throughout the course, students will apply concepts from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) to current "crises" that hinge on scientific expertise like climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of artificial intelligence.
This course is part of the quantitative methods sequence for graduate students in sociology. For most of the course, we will focus on regression-like methods for categorical outcomes, notably binary outcomes, ordered outcomes, nominal outcomes, count outcomes, and (if time permits) event outcomes. The course will also include discussion of practical issues in performing statistical analysis of secondary data. I assume that you the enter class either having data at hand to perform an analysis or that you can find data on your own. The major goals of the course are for students (1) to become proficient enough in regression models for categorical variables to understand, explain, and critique its use in articles appearing in sociology journals and (2) to be able to perform a competent analysis of data that is of sufficient quality to appear as an article in a sociology or social science journal. The major assignment for the course will be for students to write a paper that is a data analysis of secondary data. The final paper should be similar to a draft of a publishable article, although there will be some required sections not found in a regular article..
SOCIOL 406-3 Contemporary Theory in Sociological Analysis
This graduate seminar provides an overview of how different thinkers have conceived of modernity, the conditions under which society became “modern,” as well as modernity’s constituent parts, related processes, and alternatives. It puts theories of modernity in conversation with post/de-colonial critiques and the Black Radical Tradition.
For years we have understood that race is, biologically speaking, an exceedingly complex matter and that preconceived biases much more than biology govern the way people think about race. In this course, we will discuss both the biological myth and social reality of race. Specifically, this course provides an overview of the prominent theories/theorists of race and ethnicity, and is concerned with: 1) Understanding the early science of race used to justify racial classification and thinking, 2) reviewing the theories regarding the nature and persistence of race and ethnicity as meaningful social groupings in society, and 3) explaining the social significance of these group identities (e.g., how they are related to social stratification, social-cultural relations, and the political and economic dynamics in society). We will begin our review with the origins of the concept race, then move from early perspectives to the present in an aim to understand the influential theories and theorists. As we proceed in our investigation we will continuously ask: 1) What are the key assumptions, propositions and concepts of each theory?, 2) How is the theory located within the larger theoretical tradition? 3) Does this theory agree or disagree with other views in the field? 4) What is the level of empirical support for the theory? 5) To what extent does the theory help to explain contemporary patterns of race and ethnicity across time and space in the United States? and 6) How might one undermine systems of racial inequality if the respective theory is holds?"
This graduate seminar examines the dynamics of migration both from the perspective of the receiving society and from the lived experiences of migrants themselves. This course will introduce students to major theories, topics, and debates in the field of immigration with a focus on three core areas: integration and exclusion; borders and transnationalism; and citizenship and crimmigration. Throughout the course we will be attentive to the overlap between race and immigration as both scholarly areas and political imperatives and engage critical legal studies perspectives to ground our understanding of the production of immigration law. Because this is a graduate sociology course, we will also consider the genealogy of immigration as a subfield of sociology, as well as some of the key debates surrounding the study of immigration across the social sciences. While this class will focus primarily on the U.S. context from the 20th century to the contemporary period, we will also be in conversation with historical and comparative approaches to understanding immigration.
In this seminar, we examine settler colonialism as a political, social, cultural and economic formation, as well as Indigenous social thought, resistance, resilience, and resurgence, focusing on the U.S. in historical, comparative, and global perspective. Settler colonialism is a distinctive form of social organization. As Glenn (2015) has argued: “The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenes, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide.” This description is both accurate, and inadequate as it relates to the social construction of settler states.
This course engages with social theories of inequality, power, and difference, incorporating the Indigenous experience within U.S. settler colonialism. Topics covered include: indigenous perspectives on time, place, power, and knowledge; groups and tribalism; colonization and settler colonialism; the entanglements of social science with settler systems; property, dispossession, and capitalism; biopolitics, gender, and reproduction.
This seminar offers a space for graduate students to discuss topics related to college TAing and teaching. The course covers the following topics: practical skills and strategies to be an effective and efficient teaching assistant, particular TAing/teaching challenges for women, minority, international, and LGBT instructors, leading discussion sections and lecturing, how to create inclusive classrooms, how to construct a syllabus, defining your teaching philosophy, and perspectives on student evaluations.
