Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in an ideal world?
Utopian thought has a long history in Western thought as different writers have attempted to define the ideal community from Plato's Republic through to Thomas More ‘s first coining of "Utopia" as an ideal community in the Sixteenth century. Utopias were often defined as counter critiques of existing social arrangements and at times people actually attempted to create and live in "intentional communities" based on their ideals. In this seminar we will explore fictional and real utopian communities in different historical periods… such as preindustrial agricultural religious settlements (for example the Amish or Oneida), planned industrial communities (the factory town of Pullman in Chicago) and anti-and post-industrial communities (the Walden II "hippy" commune Twin Oaks emerging out of the 60s). We will use these and other cases as critical analyses of existing societies highlighting the social problems of their day…issues such as inequalities of wealth and power, individual versus collective priorities, changing family structure, sexual relations and gender roles, defining and dealing with deviants, and institutions like governance, education, work and leisure. We will explore in detail the founding, the dynamics, and the fates of attempts to live in real utopian communities. We will conclude with a consideration of the role of utopian thought in contemporary society for example the role of digital technology and smart cities in addressing climate change. We will also make use of Chicagoland as a setting to explore utopian thought and communities from the Burnham Master Plan for the City of Chicago itself to Olmsted's planned suburb of Riverdale to the religious community of Zion.
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.
In this course, we will investigate how social conditions come to be defined as social problems. This course will be divided into two sections. The first section will be an overview of how sociologists have approached the study of social problems including theoretical perspectives (symbolic interactionist, conflict, structural-functionalist and constructionist perspectives). In this section, we will also conceptually examine the roles of policymakers, social advocates, and the media in the process of defining social problems. In the second section of the course, we will use the perspectives and conceptual tools from the first part to analyze contemporary social problems including the effects of the media and social media on children and teenagers. As a class, we will also examine the debates surrounding several social problem case studies to understand how interested parties can define a similar situation as problematic, but do so for very diverse reasons and in doing so suggest very different solutions.
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.
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.
SOCIOL 220-0 Health, Biomedicine, Culture, and Society
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.
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.
SOCIOL 276-0 Critical thought on Race and Ethnicity
This course examines historical and contemporary manifestations of racism/ethnocentrism and anti-racism; and xenophobia/nationalism and internationalism. Racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism are related in ideas of ancestry and difference, and we will explore together theoretical approaches to understanding the social, cultural, political and economic aspects of difference. The course centers on racialization (how individuals/groups are sorted into races), global and local racial paradigms (the rules of race-making and racial assignment), and why these denigrating mechanisms are so difficult to eradicate. We also examine what antiracism looks like and how it might be achieved. Despite the challenging course content, this class is a blast!
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
This course provides an introduction to statistics for Sociology majors and other students interested in using computer software to analyze non-experimental data. The course will often focus on survey data, but the techniques covered apply broadly to empirical data. Survey data, specifically that derived from the General Social Survey (GSS), will provide the examples for class discussion and the foundation for the final exam. By the end of the course, students will be able to read and interpret research and perform analyses using empirical data. These skills are applicable beyond the conduct of sociological research and will enable students to critically evaluate information not only from the academic realm but from news articles and the world around them. The critical, analytical, and numerical skills developed in this course are valuable ones to have regardless of major or post-graduation plans.
Nearly all analysis in the course will be done using the statistical software "Stata". Throughout the course, we will introduce you to the software, helping you build proficiency. These introductions will occur both in class and in lab.
This course explores the economic and social changes that have constituted "development," and that have radically transformed human society. The course focuses on both the historical experience of Europe and the contemporary experience of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the historical discussion, we explore the birth of the "nation state" as the basic organizing unit of the international system; the transition from agrarian to industrial economic systems; and the expansion of European colonialism across the globe. In our discussion of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we consider the legacies of colonialism for development; the ways in which countries have attempted to promote economic development and industrialization; and issues of inequality and human welfare in an increasingly globally connected world.
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.
From the U.S. civil rights movement to Arab spring, social movements have shaped history. Under what conditions do people launch collective challenges to authority? How do they face barriers to organizing, recruiting participation, and effecting change? What explains their different strategies and trajectories, as well as the varied outcomes of their mobilization? This course explores these and other questions. We will examine various concepts, theories, and analytical approaches to the study of mobilization, as well as cases of movements from around the world.
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.
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 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.
What is the scientific status of our ideas about race? How are medical and legal ideas invoked in determinations about people's gender identities? Overall, how do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. We 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.
Technology is ubiquitous. This course covers central tenets in the sociology of technology by pairing an empirical focus on a different technology each week with a theoretical paradigm. A total of eight technologies will serve as the exemplars through which the question(s) concerning technology will be explored: bicycles, cars, computers, facial recognition, genetic sequencing, soap, shipping containers and virtual reality. Each of these technologies is approached as a window into the social, political, racial, and economic determinants of technological innovation. The central goal of the course is to equip students with the tools for unpacking the technologies societies take for granted and critically engaging with new technologies that may reproduce social inequities. While much of the scholarship we will consider is broadly sociological, some of it is drawn from other fields, and part of the goal of the course is to show what is gained when we think about technology from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
Genocide is a subset of mass murder. All genocides involve mass killings but not all mass killings are genocides. Does that matter? Is it a distinction without a difference? The answer is, yes, it does matter and there is a difference; in aims, planning, execution, results, and final resolution including justice. Genocide targets a predetermined population with the aim of elimination in entirety, every living member from seniors to babies not merely a military victory. In this class we will look at the largely modern phenomenon of genocide (including its limited subset, ethnic cleansing) focusing on the Holocaust, Bosnia, and Rwanda. We will also look briefly at today’s world. The class will investigate the instances of specificity versus comparability so as not to take anything away from a particular case on the one hand but to be social scientists on the other. A goal of this class is to identify structures and triggers which have and could lead a society down this path and what obstacles can be placed in the past, In other words, where do we find the major prompts, causes, triggers and turning points.
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.
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.
The problem with learning to do fieldwork is that you need to learn everything all at once. Fieldwork defies compartmentalization or much setting of priorities. For the most part, people learn to do fieldwork rather than being taught to do it. On the theory that learning to do fieldwork is more a matter of being socialized rather than of learning techniques, the course is arranged to provide a concentrated exposure to fieldwork. Through your own and your colleagues' field experiences and four quite different books by fieldworkers, you will be exposed to a wide variety of field settings. These monographs and your own experiences will also provide us with a common base to draw on in reflecting on the methodological and ethical issues addressed in the pieces on how to do fieldwork and ethnographic writing.
SOCIOL 476-0 Demographic Methods and Social Simulations
This is a course about solving "what if" problems (i.e., thought experiments). One such problem may inquire, "what if industry x continues to grow at the same rate?" Another may ask, "what if blacks and whites had the same educational distributions?" And a third perhaps wonders, "what if you found yourself in an iterated prisoner's dilemma fighting for your life?" Social simulations are super fancy what if problems that use a mix of math and computational code to answer a complex of important questions. This course is an introduction to a variety of what if problems and the flexible set of methods that can be used to answer the related questions.
The course begins by exploring simulations of populations and their dynamics-collectively called demographic methods. Using a simple set of empirical parameters, students will learn to simulate changes in population size and composition, as well as the formal demographic processes of fertility, mortality and migration. In this section, the what if problems center on the role of population parameters in producing both aggregate outcomes and individualized measures such as life expectancy and total fertility rate. After covering the demographic simulations, the focus turns to agentic simulations (i.e., agent-based models), where, in addition to encountering fixed population parameters, the artificially simulated and independent agents employ specific strategies. The what if questions for this part of the course center on the role of individual strategies in shaping population outcomes. During this portion, students will learn to create and analyze basic agentic simulations of large, complex social behaviors such as segregation and cooperation.
At the heart of all the methods covered in the course is a particular way of looking at the world, simultaneously from the top down and the bottom up. The course aim is to introduce students to the mix of methodological tools for social simulation and the nuanced theoretical perspective that their use entails. Students will learn and apply these techniques through a series of weekly problems sets performed in either Excel or NetLogo.
SOCIOL 476-0 Indigeneity, States, and Settler Colonialism
In this seminar, we examine settler colonialism as a political, social, cultural and economic formation, and Indigenous resistance, resilience and resurgence, focusing on the US in historical, comparative and global perspective. Settler colonialism is a distinctive form of social organization, which emerges within a global context of empires and colonial domination of peoples of the Americas, Africa, Oceania and Asia by Europeans and their descendants, in which settlers "come to stay" (Veracini 2010) and seek replacement of indigenous peoples, rather than the extraction and transfer of wealth to the "home" country (Bacon and Norton 2019). It is a constituent part of modernity. As Glenn (2015) has argued: "The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenes, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide. Settlers sought to control space, resources, and people not only by occupying land but also by establishing an exclusionary private property regime and coercive labor systems." We need increased recognition of Indigenous values, worldviews, and lifeways, as much sociological work omits the Indigenous perspective, and consequently sociological explanations are often ill-fitting or insufficient in understanding the "fourth world" of Native nations and their relations with settler societies. Notably, we seek to engage with analyses of inequality, power and difference that reflect the distinctive Indigenous experience within US settler colonialism: "Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples - hundreds of nations - not as a racial or ethnic group…" (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, p.xiii). The readings are multidisciplinary - covering sociology, Native studies, other social sciences and history, and we incorporate the works of diverse Indigenous scholars, philosophers and thought leaders. Topics covered include: indigenous perspectives on time, power and knowledge; key concepts for studying groups; overviews of the literatures on empire and colonialism and the entanglements of social science with settler colonialism; the emergence and co-constitution of modernity, empire, settler colonialism, states and indigeneity; property, dispossession and capitalism; biopolitics, reproduction, sexuality, gender; the US as a settler colonial formation; political contestation over settler colonialism and indigenous rights; native sovereignty, representation, decolonization and Indigenous justice.
Social networks have a profound affect on what you feel, think, and do. Whether or not you get a job, who will date or marry, whether or not you’ll catch a contagious disease are all affected by the social networks in which you live. This class explores the ways our social networks shape society, and how society shapes our social networks. Social Network Analysis (SNA) refers to both a theoretical perspective and a set of methodological techniques. As a theoretical perspective, SNA stresses the interdependence among social actors. This approach views the social world as patterns or regularities in relationships among interacting units and focuses on how such patterns affect the behavior of network units or actors. A “structure” emerges as a persistent pattern of interaction that can influence a multitude of behaviors, such as getting a job, income attainment, political decision making, social revolutions, organizational merges, global finance and trade markets, delinquent youth behaviors, the spread of infectious diseases, and so on. As a methodological approach, SNA refers to a catalog of techniques steeped in mathematical graph theory and now extending to statistical simulation and algebraic models. This course surveys the growing field of SNA, emphasizing the merger of theory and method while gaining hands-on experience with network data and software. As such, the course is designed to be (roughly) equal parts theory and methods. Students will leave the course with the ability to understand and apply SNA in a variety of contexts.
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.
