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.
How issues emerge. Rules, rule enforcers, rule breakers; advocates, opponents, and victims of problems. Blame, help, and entitlement. Current problems and systemic contradictions.
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.
Introduction to sociological approaches to economic life. Topics include property rights, illegal markets, money, economic inequalities, direct sales, and boycotts.
Logic and methods of social research, qualitative and quantitative analysis of social data, and ethical, political, and policy issues in social research. Foundation for further work in social research.
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 small research project and write a research paper 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. Throughout the quarter, 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.
SOCIOL 303-0 Analysis and Interpretation of Social Data
In Spring 2020, 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 their own specific research project and write a research paper relating to capital punishment or police violence.
This course will explore feminist perspectives on science and technology, also known as Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) or Feminist Technoscience. How does gender shape the production of scientific knowledge? How have feminist scholars found ways to interrogate claims about the biological basis of sex and commitments to sex as a binary (female/male) form of difference? How can we rethink our belief in technologies as neutral and value-free? How is scientific knowledge and practice also shaped by histories of colonialism, the contemporary dynamics of race, sexuality, disability, and the queer turn in the social sciences and humanities? The rich interdisciplinary field of Feminist Technoscience opens up new ways to think about the “objectivity” of science, its political underpinnings, and its effects in the world.
The course is organized around five units: (1) gendering the biology of sex; (2) feminist biology as an alternative science; (3) intersectional perspectives on science and technology; (4) recent work in feminist technoscience; and (5) governing sex and science.
From extreme inequality and global financial crises to the climate emergency confronting us today, capitalism has been the globalizing force par excellence. Not only does it connect previously isolated spaces and peoples, but it also produces such catastrophic problems at the global scale with global impacts. This course will examine how global capitalism was reconstructed in the aftermath of the World War II as the United States created a new global order. We will focus on the three pillars of this order—free trade, financial liberalization, and oil—and study how the American state created international institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization to promote the free flow of commercial goods, money and credit, and oil. We will, in turn, analyze how these transformations fueled the rise of a global economy riddled with local and global inequalities, financial imbalances, and unprecedented levels of carbon emissions.
The course will be a critical examination of how "childhood" and "adolescence" have been defined in the U.S. We will consider how modern and historical conceptions of childhood and adolescence have evolved and how these definitions have been shaped by societal forces and institutions such as the economy, religion, and politics. We will also look at the lives of children themselves and how individuals experience being children, kids, teens, and so forth in a particular time and place. As a class, we will also be very critical of cultural and media portrayals of children and teenagers (including how social problems regarding young people are discussed) and ask how these representations have reflected and shaped how society views young people. The final topic for the course will be how adolescents make the transition to adulthood socially, emotionally, and economically, and how this transition has changed over time - particularly over the last several decades.
In this course, we investigate gender relations, in the context of complex inequalities, across states, markets and families, with a focus on the United States (historically and in the contemporary era), but with an effort to place the US in comparative and global contexts and to gain some familiarity with other countries. We examine the gendered character of citizenship, political participation, social and economic rights, and try to understand gendered politics and policy from both "top down" and "bottom up" perspectives. We explore the gendered division of labor in employment and in families, and evaluate how this has been shaped by state and corporate policies, ordinary peoples’ practices and shifting cultural ideals and gendered belief systems. We examine gendered representations and practices in the community and public sphere. Finally, we look at changing family forms, which both respond to shifts in markets and states and encourage further changes in these spheres.
How and when did the identities that we know today as “straight” or “heterosexual” come into existence? And how have those identities differed across time and space? Drawing on the academic literature and representations in film and other popular media, we will examine the “invention of heterosexuality” and its transformation and diversification over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. By paying attention to multiple definitions of heterosexuality—including those that coexist within a single historical moment and location—we will problematize the notion that heterosexuality can be simply conceived as a single, unitary sexual identity. Among other topics, we will discuss the increasingly blurring boundaries between heterosexuality and other sexual identities; heteroflexibility, sexual fluidity, and other challenges to conventional definitions of heterosexuality; the power associated with heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity; the effects of sexual inequality; contemporary problems and issues, including hookup culture and definitions of sexual consent; and imagined futures of the notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation.
How do scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural understandings of race, gender, and sexuality? Conversely, how do cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice? This class will take up a series of controversies from the recent past and present to explore the dynamic interplay between expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
In this class we will consider alternative theories of genocide and ethnic cleansing and their relationship to nationalism, poverty, and civil war. We will also investigate the responses or non responses from other nations. Case studies may include The Nazi Extermination of Jews and others, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Attention will also be given to Syria and Burma.
Technology is an integral part of society: from the wheel, to the cotton gin, to the modern computer. Technology is everywhere and humans have always used technology to shape society and vice versa. How do people relate to technology? How has our culture been affected by technology? How has technology itself been shaped by societal norms, and values? This course gives an overview of the growing and important field of the Sociology of Technology. In this course we will explore the different ways that technology has affected our society through a sociological lens. We will examine how physical material combines with culture to create the distinct aspects of our society. Students may not receive credit for this course and for Sociology 392 'Technology, Work, Love, and Life in 2020.
SOCIOL 401-2 Statistical Analysis of Social Data: Applied Regression Methods II
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 a 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 sections that I require you to turn in that you would not find in a regular article.
This course provides an introduction to economic sociology. It poses the key idea of "embeddedness" and develops it by exploring the connections between economic institutions and behavior, on the one hand, and social processes, structures and relations, on the other. The course is organized topically, and people are expected to read all the required material.
This course considers the interrelationship of business, society, and democracy over the course of American history. Drawing on an interdisciplinary selection of readings, it explores topics such as the political and legal development of the corporation; the role of slavery in the development of American economic and political institutions; the rise of a new American bourgeoisie as well as the rise of the financial services industry during the nineteenth century; the role of real estate interests in shaping the racial and class segregation of the postwar metropolis; the fragmentation of the American corporate elite; public affairs consultants and the corporate-led commercialization of mass political participation; and the renovation of patrimonial capitalism at a time of extreme economic inequality.
This seminar offers a broad and advanced introduction to the field of comparative and case study methodology. The emphasis is on what are conventionally regarded in political science as "qualitative" methods for the analysis of a relatively small number of cases. In sociology, this field is generally known as comparative-historical methodology. The course focuses on recent methodological writing, though a few classical pieces are also included. The readings are not specific to any substantive subfield in political science or sociology. The course assumes no prior background in qualitative methodology, but the material is advanced.
Formal demography is characterized by a focus on the enduring collectivity of population and careful study of the processes responsible for changes in population size and composition. Of particular interest to the demographer, are the processes of fertility, mortality and migration. In addition to these three basic areas of research, demographers are also interested in a number of related issues within the broad social science and health research spectrum including marriage, retirement, segregation, disability and land use. At the heart of all of these empirical analyses of populations and related issues is a particular way of looking at the world and related set of methodological techniques.
This course aims to introduce students to this way of viewing the world. Namely, it will cover the the principal methodological tools used by demographers for studying changes in population size and composition including: basic measures of mortality, fertility and migration; life table construction; multiple decrement life tables; stable populations; population projections; age patterns of vital events; and event history analysis. Students will learn to apply these and other demographic methods through a series of weekly problem sets.
This course will provide an introduction to central topics in the sociology of health, illness, and biomedicine. At the same time, it will show how that field has been redefined and reinvigorated by science and technology studies. We will seek to understand health, health care, and biomedicine by exploring multiple domains: the work sites in which health professionals interact with one another, with their tools, and with their clients; the research settings where medical knowledge and technologies are generated; the cultural arenas within which ideas of health and disease circulate; the market relations that produce health care as a commodity; the institutions and practices that transform social inequalities into health disparities; the social movements that challenge the authority of experts; and the bodies and selves that experience and are remade by illness. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
This course sets out to think with, through, and beyond contemporary sociological theories of race, racism, and coloniality. It thus stages an intra- and inter-disciplinary discussion about the state and stakes of current theorizing on race.
This course provides an overview of the major components involved in designing an empirical research paper including (i) developing and refining a research question; (ii) situating the question in the relevant literature; and (iii) constructing an appropriate research strategy to explore the question. Throughout the course students will gain familiarity with (i) academic writing and the academic article format; (ii) the peer review publication process; (iii) the practice of giving constructive feedback on peer work; and (iv) presenting research in conference presentation style. By the end of the course students will develop a detailed research proposal that will resemble the front end of an academic journal article. While there is no one size fits all way to do research, this class will emphasize strategies conducive to writing a peer review journal article that can be applied to other academic endeavors as well (e.g. dissertation proposal development etc.).
This is a practical course aimed at helping students who are just starting out on a research project. This is not a course in the philosophy of research design and/or research methods. Although students may have a range of backgrounds and expertise we will focus on the fundamentals so that even those early on in their research careers gain familiarity with both the research process and the professional aspects of sociological research.
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.
