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.
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.
Guns are an important part of American society and culture. With more than 300,000,000 guns held by private citizens and a Constitutional amendment associated with gun ownership, the possession, regulation, meaning, and use of firearms reaches into important realms of American society, including: civil rights and liberties, identity and cognition, crime and violence, and public health and personal safety. This course explores the multifaceted role guns play in the U.S. by surveying historical, sociological, psychological, legal, and political research. From a firm foundation of the historical and constitutional origins of the 2nd amendment, the course will focus on a range of topics around Guns in America, including: the prevalence and distribution of guns; attitudes and opinions about gun ownership, possession and use; illegal and legal gun markets; gun crime and injuries; and the varieties of responses to gun injuries and crime, including, importantly the legislative and political processes that attend their development.
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 examines some of the guiding themes of sociological analysis as they were originally formulated by four influential “classical” social thinkers: Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Max Weber (1864-1920), and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Drawing on some of these theorists’ major writings, the purpose of the course is to unpack each thinker’s major concepts and consider how he fused them in order to craft a distinctive lens through which to view the social world at his own time and today."Social theory provides a lens to understand how power operates in modern societies. It helps us examine not only the production of socio-economic and political inequalities but also the reproduction of social order, namely, how society holds together despite all the antagonisms such disparities create. In this course, we will study three strands of social theory—emancipatory, positivist, and critical. Emancipatory theorists, most notably Marx, "speak truth to power" to emancipate oppressed groups. They hope their theories will arm the oppressed against their oppressors in their struggles for freedom. Mainstream, positivist theorists, in contrast, take the point-of-view of the social planner and seek to use science to reform society. Finally, critical theorists, such as Frederic Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, share positivists' skepticism toward emancipatory theorists. Yet, they do not try to base their authority on science, as they see science as just another way power operates. Moreover, they believe power to be intrinsic to social relations and think emancipation is simply not possible. Instead, they seek to reconfigure power relations to create more ethical social structures.
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.
SOCIOL 329-0 Field Research and Methods of Data Collection
The goal of this course is to give students experience in qualitative research methodologies. Qualitative methods are a primary way that sociologists learn about the larger social world, test and develop theories and hypotheses, and make sense of complex situations and interactions. Qualitative methods allow sociologists to understand the world from the perspective of the individual and gain a better understanding of how the social world operates.
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.
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.
SOCIOL 376-0 Gender-based Violence, Power and Carceral State
In the U.S., the dominant social response to gender-based violence centers policing, prisons, and other carceral practices. This course examines the intersecting power relations that shape experiences of violence and efforts to address it. We will focus on the politics and practices of criminalization and incarceration and struggles for gender, racial, and economic justice—including the prison-industrial complex; Whiteness and colonial violence; rape myths, law, and forensic technology; Black women’s activism; and social movements shaped by carceral and anti-carceral feminism.
It’s been 173 years since Horace Mann famously called education the “great equalizer,” and, as we know, public education has not led to social equality in the United States. In this course, we will explore this phenomenon, considering the complex relationship between equity, inequality, and education. We will consider various equity issues in the education system including, but not limited to: racism in K-12 education, unequal access to higher education, and the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on schools across the board. Students will vote on a fourth topic to explore for the final unit of the course. Additionally, students will spend the quarter independently researching a topic of interest, culminating in a research proposal due at the end of the course.
SOCIOL 392-0-23 Latin American Migration to the U.S. Past, Present, Future
Immigration from Latin America and the growth of the United States’ Hispanic and Latino/a populations are two of the most important and controversial issues in the recent history of the United States. Latinos/as—numbering more than 60 million in the U.S.—constitute a large and heterogeneous group with a unique social, political, and cultural history. This course will contextualize today’s debates on Latin American immigration by looking at the past, present, and future of this issue. We will discuss key moments in the development of Latin America migration to the U.S., like the Bracero Program and the Chicano movement, before turning to current issues like the border crisis and the Dream Act. The goal of the course is to provide you with a deep understanding of Latin American migration to the U.S., enabling you to grapple with the nuances of immigration policy questions and empowering you to thoughtfully navigate a hot-button topic.
In this course we will study how fear matters as a sociological project. First, we will study the building blocks of fear and how fear is ingrained in society. Second, we will study fear and misperceptions in crime media like newspapers and true crime entertainment. Third, we will study fear in the context of fiction and horror films.
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 seminar focuses on major research issues in social stratification and inequality. Stratification refers to the fact that people (or groups or institutions) are arrayed along some (usually hierarchical) continuum of value, whereas inequality focuses on the size and consequences of gaps between groups. Race and gender are key bases of stratification. Class, or socioeconomic status, is both a grounds for stratification as well as a measure of stratification itself. The course will focus on how class background, race, and gender influence inequality on the basis of socioeconomic status. We will discuss theoretical and empirical approaches to studying stratification; explore key domains in which stratification is produced, reproduced and manifested, such as families, schools, the labor market, and neighborhoods; and consider the political responses and debates regarding stratification. The course will focus mostly on the United States, although we will also consider cross-national comparisons among OECD countries.
SOCIOL 476-0 Topics in Sociological Analysis: Interview Methods
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.
SOCIOL 476-0 Professional Writing and Publishing Seminar
This seminar examines the academic writing and publication process in sociology, giving particular emphasis to writing and publishing articles in professional journals. Students analyze the “anatomy” of journal articles, considering the different ways of motivating an article and organizing a review of the literature, as well as the mechanics of good academic writing.
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.
In this seminar, we focus on the role of states in creating, reshaping, reproducing, transforming, and, perhaps, reducing or eliminating inequalities, differences and power along dimensions of gender, race/ethnicity, and class. States, via classifying and stratifying processes, are involved in the creation of racial, gender, class and other categories, and in (re) distributing resources and rights across these categories. In the process of drawing and policing boundaries, states shape how and where significant activities take place, and which people are included or excluded from rights, benefits and resources. The class is comparative, historical and global in orientation.
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.
