DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

This course examines inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class, and gender. Lectures emphasize the mechanisms through which inequality develops and comes to be seen as legitimate, natural, and desirable. We will also examine the economic, social, and political consequences of rising inequality. We will place special focus on poverty and inequality in Native North America.

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.

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, a prerequisite for 207. 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. Taught with SOCIOL 227; may not receive credit for both courses.

Most of our waking hours are spent participating in various types of formal organizations - schools, corporations, churches, or (unfortunately) prisons. We generally begin our lives in hospitals, and often end our days in nursing homes. While we want to join some organizations (e.g. Northwestern - go Cats!), we also avoid others like plague (e.g. the DMV). But where do organizations come from? What do they have in common? How to they shape who we get to know, how we get ahead or fall behind? Why do organizations change or fail to change?

We will begin to answer these questions using three main theoretical frameworks - sometimes referred to as "rational," "natural," and "open" systems approaches - that pull together the aspects of organizations in coherent approaches with different emphases and implications. By the end of the quarter, you will be able to think analytically about organizations from these different and sometimes competing perspectives. This should enable you to think about how you might better survive and thrive in our organizational world.

This course is designed to provide students with an overview of the field of population studies, also known as demography. Demography covers all of the factors related to changes in the size and characteristics of a human population. The topics that will be covered in the course include health disparities in the United States, the impact of AIDS on family life and longevity in Africa, migration patterns within and from Latin America, the reasons behind sex-selective abortions in Asia, and the implications of the current low birthrates in Europe.

What does the global financial crisis of 2008 mean for the future of capitalism? Is it the end of the unregulated, free market approach, or is it the start of an authoritarian political order controlled by billionaires? How the United States became a country riddled with extreme inequality and catastrophic financial crises? To answer these questions we will study key historical developments that led to the crisis of 2008 in three parts. We will begin with the crisis itself and explore why it happened. We will try to determine who should be held responsible, the bankers who gambled on our prosperity or the regulators and economists who turned a blind eye to them. In the second part of the course, we will go back to the 1930s and examine how elites built the Keynesian New Deal state to redistribute wealth with the goal of preventing the recurrence of another Great Depression. In the final part of the course, we will study the demise of the Keynesian state in the turbulent decade of the 1970s, when the US economy was hit with record unemployment and inflation in the face of global oil shocks. We will see how the Federal Reserve took over managing the economy, how this led to financial deregulation, and how a new right-wing coalition of politicians, grassroots activists, and policy advisers instituted the infamous Reagan tax cuts. Studying the history of our present in these three parts will allow us to rethink what the economic sources of power are in contemporary capitalism.

This course introduces some of the main topics of medical sociology: the social construction of health and illness; inequalities in the distribution of illness and health care; the globalization of health care; and the organization of health care work, the medical professions, and the health care system. Students will learn about variations in who gets sick and why, how the health professions evolved in the United States and how the health care "turf" has been divided among professions, whether and when patients and their families participate in medical decision making, why physicians have more authority and receive higher incomes in the U.S. than elsewhere, what doctors do when interns and residents make mistakes, what the relationship is between hospitals and other health care organizations and how that relationship has changed over time, how the American healthcare system compares to other healthcare systems, how expenditures on preventive medicine compare with expenditures on high-tech cutting-edge medicine, and why the U.S. invests so much in high-tech medicine.

This course addresses the role that social factors play in in the development of sociological perspectives and schools of thought. Attention will focus on the role of race, gender and power in the rise of American sociology. The case of W. E. B. Du Bois will be highlighted to shed light on the origins and development of American sociology.

In this course, students will develop the necessary skills to conceptualize, plan, and execute interview-based research projects. We will cover topics such as fine-tuning a research idea, formulating research questions, designing a rigorous research plan, navigating the IRB process, recruiting respondents, creating the interview guide, conducting interviews, and analyzing and writing up data. We will also consider reflexivity, ethics, and the complexities of interviewing various populations. Students at all levels of the graduate student process are welcome. However, the course tends to focus on issues that arise at the beginning stages of a second year paper or dissertation proposal. Those students will therefore receive preference in course enrollment.