DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

This class will sharpen your writing.  You will write and present a seven-to-nine page paper on civic activism in contemporary China.  In the process of writing this paper, you will practice identifying a theme you find interesting, formulating an argument, finding data and source material on the internet from China in English translation, and relating your theme to the scholarly literature we read and discuss together in class.  Some of the progress you will make in your writing abilities will be technical – what counts as evidence, what is the difference between data and scholarly texts, how do you cite and give credit to those who preceded you; some will be intellectual – how do you refute and how do you prove, how do you evaluate your own argument to be clear about its limitations, how do you assess the political relevance of your theme; and some of it will be emotional – how do you cope with the panic that is welling up when you are expected to tame the chaos of reality into a tidy argument, how do you cope with disappointment and ire when I tell you that your second draft is not good enough, how do you cope with your self-doubts when you are trying to find a needle of evidence in the haystack of the internet under time-pressure?

            The Chinese have achieved enormous economic growth over the last forty years which has dramatically raised living conditions in China.  The Chinese Communist Party has steered this economic development through authoritarian rule which denies the Chinese liberties you take for granted.  Thirty-one years ago, the Communist Party killed Chinese who demanded these liberties by employing the military inside the country.  Since the massacre of 1989, protest in the streets has moved to networking on the internet.  You will write your paper about this challenge to authoritarian rule by engaging some of the following questions: How have urban Chinese lived with the trauma of the massacre?  What exactly happened in 1989?  Making and uploading videos to the internet is a crucial weapon for activists.  How do you evaluate the power of individual videos to force political change?  These videos are documentaries, performance art, interviews, covert recordings of state agents, cries for help of fugitives in real time, and witness testimony.  The creators of these videos are prepared to take risks because they feel there is something wrong with China today.  These feelings are value judgments, or valuations.  How do you tease out the values by which activists judge the state and evaluate their lives in China?  What in turn are the value judgments of American reporters who report on Chinese activism to the American public?  What are the value judgments of American professors who study Chinese activism?  And what are your own value judgments: If it turns out that U.S. capitalism in its combination with democracy cannot economically compete with Chinese capitalism in its combination with authoritarian rule, and you were forced to choose, would you choose capitalism or democracy?  What parts of your life would be impossible under authoritarian rule?  Which line would populism and neo-authoritarianism in America have to cross for you to fight the government?

What makes food social? What is sociological about eating? How does society shape our relationship with food? These are questions at the center of this course. During the span of this quarter, we will learn about the role of food in society, how social norms as well as culture impact our view of food and review the following topic within food and society: Food inequality, food and sustainability, food and gender and lastly, food culture in the US. We will do so by employing a sociological perspective to food that will help is critically engage with something we do every day - preparing and eating food. This is an introductory level class and does not require prior knowledge in sociology or in knowledge production. By the end of the quarter students will view food as a social and community construct that impacts our lives, well-being, and society.

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.

Present-day medicine and health care are flashpoints for a wide array of controversies (many of them exacerbated by the global Covid-19 pandemic). Whose interests should the health care system serve and how should it be organized? How trustworthy is the medical knowledge we rely on when confronted with the threat of illness? How can the ethical character of biomedical research best be ensured? How do we manage health risks in an uncertain world? How can health care be made affordable? Is it possible for the benefits of good health to be shared equitably across lines of social class, race, gender, and nation? What are the proper roles of health professionals, scientists, patients, activists, corporations, and the state in establishing medical, political, economic, and ethical priorities? This course will provide a broad introduction to the domain of health and medicine to take up such controversies as a matter of concern to all.

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.

This course examines the recent history of capitalism around the world, and is meant to whet your appetite rather than to provide comprehensive coverage.  We examine four historical topics: what communism was, and why people fear it; why there is more poverty and inequality in the U.S. than other developed countries, and whether this is a problem; how some developing countries have managed to become rich; and the rise of the financial sector in the American economy, at the expense of manufacturing and services.  We then close with an examination of the racialized history of capitalism, and students are asked to use everything they have learned in the course to think through solutions for questions of the current moment.

What are gangs and what do they do? What do we mean when we talk about gangs, and how has that changed over time? This course gives students a vocabulary and a theoretical toolkit for answering those questions by diving deep into sociological scholarship on the concept of “the gang.” We’ll look at the ways that scholars, governments, law enforcement and popular culture make sense of and respond to gangs, as well as the ways that gangs have changed in response to those efforts. We’ll begin with an overview of classic gang scholarship. From there, students will be introduced to new developments in social scientists’ understanding of how gangs operate, as well as accounts of how other groups in society have responded to gangs. Readings will combine both theory and empirical description, preparing students to engage with tough questions like how globalization and the internet have changed the way that gangs operate, or how the topic of gangs intersects with groups like Black Lives Matter, or calls to defund the police. By the end of the course, students will not only get an overview of the last century of gang scholarship, they will be urged to question what the word “gang” might mean to them—and to society as a whole.

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 20^th and 21^st 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.

This course will survey social movements including "citizen scientists," HIV/AIDS activists, "biohackers," and others that contest, mediate, or mistrust expert authority. In these cases, science and society are not separate. Instead, they co-produce each other: various publics participate in knowledge production alongside experts and technoscience mediates the way that we understand our membership in groups.

Students will gain intellectual tools from the field of science and technology studies (STS) to grapple with the way that credibility, expertise, and trust unfold in current events like the covid-19 pandemic.

Against the backdrop of Cartesian reservations about the possibility of a "science" of the social world, this course examines several of the major justifications that social thinkers have offered, historically, for constructing such a science.  In the process, the course also considers the different conceptions of the social world that have been part of these justifications. The principal thinkers examined are Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

In this seminar we will consider how one formulates a research questions and puts evidence together in order to investigate specific instances of the culture-society interaction and, from doing so, to assess cultural theory.  The course is for students who (1) have some background in cultural sociology (usually by having taken SOC 420), and (2) have in mind a research project involving culture, either one that is already underway or one that is envisioned.  All participants will be actively engaged in cultural research (dissertation proposal, second-year paper, pilot study, etc.), at least for the duration of the course itself.  The goal is to create a productive interplay between research activities and methodological awareness. 

Our emphasis will be on designing research that meets the standards of science while maintaining sensitivity to the peculiar characteristics of culture.  We shall be comparing sociological methods with those from the history and cultural studies in terms of the relationship between evidence and argument.  We’ll look at the steps of research from topic to question formation to hypotheses to data collection to analysis of findings to issues of reliability and validity to publication.  Along the way we shall consider such issues as specifying cultural objects, making appropriate comparisons, assessing evidence, and analyzing social and aesthetic texts.  Our emphasis is on research design and logic; we will not cover specific techniques of data analysis or measurement, though you might want to pursue these areas.

Introduction to the department, faculty, and adjunct faculty. Faculty discuss their research and teaching interests. Mandatory two-quarter weekly seminar for first-year study.