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.
Gender studies have traditionally focused on women. Yet critical work on men and masculinities show us how people of all genders are impacted by gender expectations and assumptions. Furthermore, studies of masculinities shed light on practical questions like, why do men die earlier than women? And, why are men more likely to commit mass shootings? In recent years, the public spotlight has cast light on savory and unsavory aspects of masculinity; think about the rise of the term “toxic masculinity,” the #MeToo movement, advertisements aimed at men, and blogs commenting on the behavior of men on the reality show The Bachelorette. In this course, we will go beyond banal statements like “men are trash” to critically ask, What role does masculinity play in social life? How is masculinity produced, and are there different ways to be masculine? This course provides students with an intensive introduction to the foundational theory and research in the field of masculinities studies. We will use an intersectional lens to study the ways in which the concept and lived experience of masculinity are shaped by economic, social, cultural, and political forces. As we study the institutions that socialize people into gender, we will examine how the gendered social order influences the way people of all genders perform masculinity as well as the ways men perceive themselves, people of other genders, and social situations. Verbally and in writing, students will develop an argument about the way contemporary masculinity is constructed and performed.
How do sociologists do their work? How do they make discoveries and draw conclusions about the social world around us? This course is an introduction to sociological research methods. We will learn how to design a research study - everything from choosing a topic and formulating a research question to developing a research plan. We will explore a range of research methods from surveys, interviewing, observational methods and content analysis to "big" data approaches. We will also think about the strengths and weaknesses of various sociological methods and what these methods can contribute to our understanding of the social world. We will also debate and discuss the role of the researcher in the research process along with thinking about ethical concerns and IRB protections for research subjects. We will also critically examine how social science research is presented to us in our everyday lives (including news reporting, political polls and social media postings). The goal of this course is for students to be able to design an appropriate methods plan to investigate a sociological research question they are interested in, but also to become more critical when learning about the latest social science study from media and social media outlets.
SOCIOL 303-0 Analysis and Interpretation of Social Data
This course introduces statistics and data analysis for the social sciences, focusing on understanding, interpreting, and deploying data and statistical analysis to understand the social world.
The course begins without numbers, encouraging students to be critical and analytical of the data they encounter every day. Using examples from policy, journalism, and the election, students will practice reading, interpreting, and critiquing empirical analyses.
After gaining familiarity with the reasoning underlying data analysis, the second part of the course will introduce basic statistical analysis. Students will collect, analyze, and interpret data in an area of their interest. The goal is for students to critically engage with statistical topics – to understand the strengths, weaknesses, assumptions, and contributions of statistics to scientific understanding and exploration.
Finally, the course will explore how computation is remaking modern social understanding. Though a focus on machine learning and neural networks, students will explore the contribution of data to human knowledge, while also gaining insight on why such methods pose serious challenges to human well-being.
While not a programming course, students will do exercises and homework using free tools, such as google sheets and the statistical software “R”. Labs will be focused on gaining proficiency with these tools.
On a daily basis we consume—often without notice or concern—a substantial amount of racial knowledge. We routinely ingest, for example, infographics about demographic trends, media coverage on crime and undocumented immigration, and advertisements for ancestry tests. In complex and contextually specific ways, this diet shapes our personal and collective identities, social interactions and relationships, and political aspirations and anxieties. In this course, we endeavor to study the politics of racial knowledge—the ways in which categories, measurements, and other techniques of knowledge production have helped to constitute “race” as a seemingly objective, natural demarcation among human populations and institute forms of racial domination and inequality. Historically, racial knowledge has stipulated and legitimated what we might describe as a kind of racial ontology, a set of assumptions, claims, and prescriptions about race and racial superiority/inferiority—e.g. the notion that “whites” or “the West” represent the apex of human civilization.
Drawing on diverse texts, this course explores of the emergence, evolution, and effects of racial knowledge. This exploration will begin by discussing the historical relationship between the modern concept of race and European colonialism and slavery. Subsequently, we will track several major developments in the history of racial knowledge, from Enlightenment naturalists to censuses to contemporary genomics research.
This course is an overview of the sociology of the family focusing on contemporary issues in the U.S. We will begin the course, however, by looking at the history of the family and how its form and roles within have changed historically. The course will pay particular attention to diversity in family experiences by social status including generation, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender. We will also think about how the intersection of work and family lives differ greatly across demographic groups as well as addressing popular misconceptions regarding the integration of occupational and family lives. The aim of this course is for students to learn how sociologists have studied families in the U.S., understand general trends in how contemporary U.S. families live, explore issues of diversity among family experiences and structures, and contemplate how “the family” fits in with other social institutions, including the economy. Overall, the goal of the course is for students to become more engaged and critical of issues related to family life that are presented to us in our daily lives through the media, from politicians and family advocates, and in our interpersonal exchanges.
Discussions of "the economy" often seem distant and technical. But economic activity can also be viewed like any other social activity: behavior that is structured by norms, institutions, and relationships. Economic Sociology presents this perspective. The course discusses sociology's main insights about the economy and how they contrast with perspectives from economics and psychology. Among other topics, we will discuss money's functions in intimate ties, changing norms around financial management, the relationship between money, gender, and race, and how this all relates to aggregate trends of inequality.
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.
Social stratification explores how human society gets divided into haves and have-nots. It encompasses both the unequal distribution of scarce resources and the processes through which those resources are distributed unevenly to individuals according to a wide range of social characteristics. It also explores how individuals can change their social position over time (mobility) and examines how different dimensions of social status (such as race, class, and gender) can intersect, or sometimes diverge. This class will cover sociological explanations, theories, and research on key forms of inequality in the United States. Some of the main questions we will address include: What is social stratification and how is society “stratified”? What do the extremes of social inequality look like? How does one climb the ranks in society? What are the social institutions that contribute to, and sometimes attenuate, inequality? What role do race and gender play in stratifying society? What are the consequences of inequality in the United States for individuals? And where do we go from here?
This course is part of the quantitative methods sequence for graduate students in sociology. The main topic of the course is the theory and practice of linear regression analysis. We will cover multiple ordinary least squares regression, regression assumptions, regression diagnostics, basic path models, data transformations, and issues in causal inference. If time permits, we may discuss other regression-based topics such as fixed and random effects models.
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.
Much of the social world is stored in digital text. Such textual traces include social media posts, email correspondences, party manifestos, blogs, novels, newspaper articles, press releases, medical records, academic articles, and much more. Not only are archival data increasingly available in electronic form, but more and more human communication and interaction occurs natively through digital text. These vast amounts of data can be a treasure trove for social science – but to make them useful for our purposes, we need natural language processing and machine learning methods.
This class offers an overview of text analytical tools currently used in social science research. You will be introduced to a set of methods and provided with examples of how they are applied to answer concrete social science research questions. Beyond surveying approaches, we will explore some of the methods ourselves, and you will learn how to use them for your own work. In this class, we will use R. Therefore, some coding experience (or exceptional motivation to attain it independently alongside the class) is expected.
