Sociology (SOC)

SOC151 Introductory Sociology

This course is an introduction to the systematic study of the social sources and social consequences of human behavior, with emphasis on culture, social structure, socialization, institutions, group membership, social conformity, and social deviance.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC202 Social Analysis

This course is an introduction to the major components of sociological analysis: the language of sociological inquiry, research techniques and methodology, types of explanation, and the relationship between theory and research.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC206 Introduction to Journalism: Constructing the News

Champions of journalism are fond of talking about bedrock values: fairness, objectivity, transparency. But like any idea--or ideology--these keywords have their own genealogies, and their own constructed natures; in other words, they came from somewhere. This course aims to pull apart our received notions of facticity, objectivity, and transparency in news/journalism/nonfiction, tracing their roots, understanding their historical context, and considering how we deploy them in our own work. Students will learn the fundamentals of reporting in hands-on assignments that pull them out into the world to gather stories. This journalistic work will occur alongside class discussions of canonical (and neglected) strands of journalism history, drawn in part from Bruce Shapiro's anthology Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America. These include readings from early Black press pioneers (Ida B. Wells, Marvel Cooke), muckrakers and investigative journalists (Lincoln Steffens, Vera Connolly), and pathbreaking science journalism (Rachel Carson's Silent Spring). Readings will also include criticism that examines our present media situation, including selections from Raven Lewis Wallace's The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and Ben Smith's, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT288, COL288, CSPL288
Prereq: None

SOC212 Social Theory

Through close reading, discussion, and active interpretation, this course will critically examine the basic writings of classical and contemporary social theorists who have influenced the practice of sociology.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC231 Sociology of Crime and Punishment

This course provides an introduction to the sociological study of crime and punishment. Crime is rarely far from news headlines or the public imagination. Every day, reports of drug dealing, muggings, and homicide fuel anxiety and debate about the problems of law and order. Here, we consider such debates in the context of both a vision for a just society and the everyday workings of the criminal justice system. The course is divided into three sections. We begin with an introduction to the historical meanings and measures of crime in society and then situate the modern U.S. within this history. In part two, we become familiar with the major ways that social scientists think about criminality and crime prevention. In part three, we turn to considerations of punishment. We ask how punishment is conceptualized in the U.S. and other nations, whether the American system of mass imprisonment is effective, and how we might envision improvements and alternatives.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC234 Media and Society

This course offers an introduction to the study of media, with a focus on critical social perspectives and controversies. A variety of media formats will be considered, with particular attention to print and visual images. The course takes up questions of representation, participation, consumerism, pleasure, and power that have dominated sociological and cultural studies approaches to media since the Frankfurt School. Topics will include advertising and branding, pornography, photojournalism, alternative media, social control, stereotypes, and objectification. Students will engage historical and theoretical texts and will be asked to participate in media processes, including production, interpretation, and critique.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC240 Comparative Race and Ethnicity

This course is an introduction to the sociological study of race and ethnicity in comparative and historical perspective. This is not a course about the experiences of particular races or ethnic groups in any particular part of the world. Rather, this course explores how ideas about racial difference take hold in different parts of the world in different ways and with very different consequences. Through comparisons of Western and non-Western societies, we will investigate how race and ethnicity operate as markers of social exclusion in distinctive ways.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC241 Mental Illness and Society

Psychiatric disorders are commonly viewed through a purely biomedical and/or a psychological framework. In this course, we will apply a sociological imagination to the topic and interrogate the ways in which mental illness, often seen as a supremely private "personal trouble," is also a public issue. We will read the works of classic and contemporary scholars, but we will also use memoirs and films to sensitize us to the experience of mental illness itself. We will explore mental illness as a social construction, stigma, and labeling theory and explore issues of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in mental illness.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC243 Being Together: Affect, Care and the Politics of Experimental Kinship

This course looks at unique and experimental forms of kinship, community, and intimacy through the implicit and explicit challenges they offer to the foundational role of the privatized family unit to civic and economic life. We will look at historical examples of collectives, communes, and intentional communities to explore the challenges and possibilities of alternative forms of being, living, and working together. This course will also focus on college as a perhaps unique context for work about and involving friendship and collaboration, and will involve students in creative and analytical projects. There will be a specific focus on digital culture and social media, aging and vulnerability, interspecies companionship, and the politics of affect.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC244 Feminist and Queer Theories of Social Reproduction

This course will introduce students to the study of social reproduction and power with an emphasis on feminist, queer, and transnational approaches to inquiry and action. We will begin by exploring key methodologies and theoretical framings for understanding contemporary "American" cultural, social, and political formations both within and beyond the territorial U.S., focusing on the effectiveness of discursive and historical modes of critical analysis. The subsequent sections of the course will turn to three case studies of the historical routes and transnational implications of U.S.-based political discourses around (1) population control and reproductive justice, (2) abolition and the prison-industrial complex, and (3) debt and higher education. By engaging with each area of inquiry through theoretical, historical, and grounded activist texts, we will think through the possibilities for utilizing academic work in concert with movement-based engaged scholarship to address the uneven distribution of life chances and the potential of imagining the world otherwise.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS244
Prereq: SOC151

SOC245 Intersectionality and Identity (FGSS Gateway)

Intersectionality has emerged as a central motif within both social analysis and political debate. We will examine the origins of this framework within black feminism and women-of-color activism, as well as the way this framework traveled to, and is used within, sociology and other disciplines. The course will also address critiques of intersectionality that have emerged within and outside of feminist theory, and extends the concept of intersectionality to think through intersections between various social identities and social institutions such as capitalism and colonialism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS245, AMST254
Prereq: None

SOC246 Social Movements

How, when, and why do social movements emerge? What motivates individuals to participate? What transforms problems into grievances and grievances to action? How should movements be organized, and what tactics should they use? What factors explain movement success and failure (and how should success and failure be defined)? What is a social movement, anyway? This course seeks to introduce some of the major ways scholars have approached such questions and, at the same time, to give a sense of both the high drama and the everyday details of social movement activism, using historical and sociological case studies. Course readings concentrate on U.S. movements, including racial justice, class, gender, and sexuality-based activism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS256
Prereq: SOC151

SOC247 Drugs, Culture, and Society

This course addresses a variety of issues ranging from the social variation in and construction of drug experiences; the nature of scientific knowledge regarding drug use and the brain; the global trade in drugs and its relationship to histories of colonialism and contemporary forms of Western hegemony; notions of health, harm, and rehabilitation; and the various strategies that contemporary states rely upon in addressing issues pertaining to drug use (particularly criminal justice measures and interventions focused on harm reduction). The course places particular emphasis on the ways drug use is framed in relation to questions of freedom, justice, and the self, ultimately forming a part of a disciplinary apparatus that impacts everyone, whether we directly use drugs or not.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC255 Sociology of Knowledge

To map power-knowledge relationships, the sociology of knowledge grounds an analysis of knowledge in terms of social structures, the sets of patterned practices that define and give meaning to social life at individual, communal, and institutional levels. In the broadest sense, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the relationship between the (epistemic) content and the social context of knowledge. How was knowledge produced and with what institutional resources? Who produced knowledge and why did they produce it? Who benefits from the circulation of knowledge? What effects in the world does knowledge engender? Our basic course objectives are to a) introduce sociology of knowledge as a form of critical inquiry, b) describe and distinguish the approaches and research methods associated with the sociology of knowledge, and c) learn how to analyze knowledge and knowledge-making practices in their social context using these methods.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SISP250, EDST251
Prereq: None

SOC256 Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Empowerment, Exploitation, and the Politics of Sex

This course explores the history, politics, and social meaning of sex work. Focusing particularly but not exclusively upon prostitution, we will pay careful attention to the diverse range of social experiences that form sex work, as well as the way in which prostitution is used as a governing metaphor within sexual relations more generally. Some questions the course will consider: How has sex work changed over time, and what do these changes tell us about both the nature of sex work and about the broader society? In what ways is sex work similar to or different from other forms of service labor or other types of intimate relationship? How do questions of race, class, sexuality, and gender alter the meaning and experience of sex work? What sorts of desires and expectations do clients bring to interactions with sex workers, and in what ways have these shifted over time? Recent controversies concerning sex trafficking and underage prostitution will also be addressed, as will the effects of various regulatory schemes that have been developed around the world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS255
Prereq: SOC151

SOC256Z Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Empowerment, Exploitation, and the Politics of Sex

This course explores the history, politics, and social meaning of sex work. Focusing particularly but not exclusively upon prostitution, we will pay careful attention to the diverse range of social experiences which form sex work, as well as the way in which prostitution is utilized as a governing metaphor within sexual relations more generally. Some questions the course will consider: How has sex work changed over time, and what do these changes tell us about both the nature of sex work and about the broader society? In what ways is sex work similar to or different from other forms of service labor or other types of intimate relationships? How do questions of race, class, sexuality, and gender alter the meaning and experience of sex work? What sorts of desires and expectations do clients bring to interactions with sex workers, and in what ways have these shifted over time? Recent controversies concerning sex trafficking and underage prostitution will also be addressed, as will the effects of various regulatory schemes that have been developed around the world. The course will be taught synchronously, but students who are in time zones that would make participation difficult will have an asynchronous option.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS255Z
Prereq: None

SOC259 Cultural Studies of Health

Nothing is more fundamental to the human condition than our most basic right--the right to healthy life. Tragically, this right is inequitably distributed across human bodies and populations, especially along axes of race, gender, class, disability, age, and nationality. In fact, persons residing in the U.S. do not have a right to healthy life. Issues of health and illness are, quite literally, matters of life and death that are shaped by broader political and economic institutions in human societies. In neoliberal nation states like the U.S., the guardian of the right to live a healthy life is a highly bureaucratic and technological form of corporate medicine. Medicine comprises a network of social institutions and technoscientific practices that people have created and use to diagnose and heal our bodily and psychic ills. While the practice of medicine has produced dramatic improvements in life expectancy and quality of life for billions of people, most people on the planet do not have access to basic medical care. Who thrives, who gets sick, who dies, and why constitute core questions for social justice. This course investigates the complex embroidery of biosocial and cultural processes that shape the unequal experiences and meanings of health. Cultural studies of health document the role of medicine as a great instrument of power that both generates and alleviates suffering. As more and more areas of social life and parts of bodies are falling under the control of medicine (a process called medicalization), we must ask, What are the dynamics and implications of medicalization for human societies and cultures? Drawing on provocative readings and media from diverse fields in sociology and cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine, this course will investigate these questions and more with an emphasis on the answers to them might contribute to social justice and improve the conditions necessary for human thriving.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: STS262
Prereq: None

SOC260 Sound and Screen

This course explores contemporary developments in the study of media, focusing on three primary areas--music, video games, and the Internet--that depart from and sometimes challenge earlier frameworks rooted in visual and narrative forms. In the first unit of the course, we will examine the relation of music to identity formation, as well as revisit media scholars' longstanding interest in questions of meaning in light of music's particular characteristics. In the second unit of the course, we will investigate the social dimensions of video game play, focusing on the often-overlooked seriousness of play and on the unique properties of games as rule-bound systems. In the third unit, we will review and "unpack" some of the social, psychological, economic, and bodily transformations thought to be instigated by Internet use. Overall, the course aims to revisit sociologists' and media scholars' preoccupation with power, inequality, freedom, autonomy, and agency in light of the contemporary prevalence and particular characteristics of sonic and interactive media.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC262 The Rise and Fall of the Nuclear Family

In the United States, the "American Dream" family has often been thought to include a heterosexual, two-parent household with 2.5 kids, a house in the suburbs, and a white picket fence. While this is no longer the dominant family form, this "ideal" still holds great symbolic meaning, and non-normative family forms continue to be stigmatized and pathologized or rendered illegitimate and not considered as family. This course will examine the changing dynamics of families in the US and worldwide. We will consider how families function both within and beyond the context of the nuclear family as well as the political, legal, and social implications of who counts as family. We will focus on how race, class, gender, and sexuality shape family life and we will explore themes including marriage promotion policy, the division of household labor, gender inequality, intergenerational families, non-biogenetic kinship, families of choice, and more. Course texts will include sociological, historical, and queer theory approaches, in addition to sources from popular media. Through reading and engaging with literature on diverse family forms, this course aims to use a critical lens to approach the concept of the nuclear family and to consider the future possibilities of the family as a social institution.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC265 From Shirtwaists to Hoodies: Fashion and Public Life

Pictured prevalently and worn close to the body, fashion is a powerful and personal means of expression and documenting public life. This course presents a loose chronology of fashion, from the twentieth century to today, through a selection of themes that will allow students to consider it in terms of its social, political, economic and aesthetic impact. Through the interplay of image, clothing, and text, each week, we will explore the fashion industry from various perspectives, examining the key role makers and consumers play in constructing fashion both historically and today. Specifically, we will question the ways we deploy dress and style to document public life, from the personal to the political, and how it informs our material and visual relationships with the world. In addition to lectures and readings discussion, class time will be allotted to students' fashion documentation projects. Fashion theory will also be introduced to ground our explorations of fashion, variously as a cultural object, embodied practice, site of technological innovation, and tool for shaping one's identity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CSPL
Identical With: CSPL187, FGSS187, IDEA187
Prereq: None

SOC266 The Social Life of Data

All over the world, actions, feelings, and thoughts are becoming data. Divining future desires and anxieties, promiscuous digital networks collect and collate a wide variety of everyday data, marking populations as risky or profitable. Participation in these networks is frequently mandatory in order to access a wide variety of political, social, and economic opportunities. Even if you manage to delete your account or withdraw from these networks, digital systems leave ghostly activity traces or zombie profiles waiting to come back to life. The rise of these data systems offers profound sociological and philosophical challenges to how we understand social life, power, control, memory, conscious thought, and even the nature of humanity and the environment.

This course engages with the impact of data infrastructures and digital technologies in a non-deterministic fashion, which is to say that technical systems and structures, while powerful, do not fully determine social possibility. Focusing on historical, established, and emergent data systems, we look to understand technology as a field of affordance and prohibition, with feelings, thoughts, and politics dynamically interacting with rapidly modulating standards, norms, and methods. Course themes address a variety of theoretical topics that have been central to the social study of science and technology, including the efficacy of critique in encountering information processing systems.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC269 Bad Sex

In a 2003 op-ed in support of same-sex marriage, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks writes, "Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations." Brooks is far from alone in this critique of promiscuity. What is it about "casual encounters" and hookup culture that so disturbs? Why is sex a magnet for anxieties about selfishness and irresponsibility? Why do we think of anonymity and intimacy in sex as mutually exclusive? What do we make of desires that are politically troubling? On what basis are particular forms of sex and sexuality vilified or valued? Is love the antidote to sexual hedonism, or hedonism in disguise? This course will consider widespread cultural anxieties about sex, sexuality, desire, and pleasure from sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS271
Prereq: SOC151

SOC270 Urban Societies

This course is a study of the social construction of the city focused primarily on the U.S. context. It examines various themes related to the development of modern cities beginning with the consolidation of capitalism during the industrial revolution. The class will consider the distinct experience of urban life as opposed to other modes of existence, or what Louis Wirth calls "Urbanism as a Way of Life." In addition, students will look at forms of stratification such as race and class inequality and their relationship to spatial issues such as suburbanization and revitalization. Also considered are contemporary issues such as globalization, the revival or renewal process of many American cities, environmental issues, as well as the effect of new media on how we conceptualize the city. All of this will be done by focusing on the relationship between individual experiences and the effect of the urban environment on issues of identity construction and interpersonal relations. In order to develop critical thinking and engagement around these urban issues, the course emphasizes weekly writings and class participation in development towards a final paper.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC275 The Hair Class

Hair does things. It covers and expose us. We pluck, conceal, wax, curl, and otherwise manage it. Its presence and absence serve as sites of critical engagement, personal and cultural expression, and political strife. This course will explore the social significance of hair, wherever, and on whomever it grows (or fails to grow). We will discuss daily practices, politics, histories, and legends about the manipulation of human and animal hair. We will draw on social theory, visual and social analyses, and cultural commentary to understand hair follicles as both incredibly ordinary and fantastically bizarre. This is an advanced discussion-based research seminar that is writing-intensive.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC278 Bored in the House: Work, Leisure, and the Domestic Mundane

At the beginning of the COVID epidemic, Detroit rapper Curtis Roach released an instant classic on TikTok, a fifteen second ditty capturing the zeitgeist of the coming wave of domestic isolation: "Okay I'm bored in the house, and I'm in the house bored." The recent waves of mass quarantine, both forced and quasi-voluntary, have crystallized our focus on the domestic, and its attendant crises. More than ever, we must confront the vanishing material and psychic separations between work and leisure, the badly needed reimagining of public and private not anchored in a spectral domestic privacy, and the foundational dynamics of class, race, sexuality, gender, capacity, and institutionalized violence that structure where we can live, work, and play. This course has a special focus on the exhausting digital, which sucks up ever more energy (both in terms electric power--see the astounding energy use to train and deploy generative AI--and human attention and engagement) while leaving us with sleeping problems, carpal tunnel, and phantom vibrations. This course seeks to be not just an academic study of the themes of this course, but an ongoing experiment in boredom praxis. We will think about what we do when we are bored, and why, and we will try to sit with and direct our boredom in gently investigational ways. This also extends to critically thinking about how we do work in this class, and our techniques and tactics of maintaining leisure time in academia.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM396
Prereq: None

SOC280 Abolition and Social Praxis

This course will examine some of the analyses of society, social power, and societal reform advanced and practiced by diverse activists who organize their work around the theme of abolition. Inspired by activist efforts to eliminate prisons and policing, abolition is here understood as an attempt to link a worldview that advocates for the disassembly of existing, oppressive social structures combined with efforts to generate new, more liberatory forms of social relationship in the here and now. As a form of activism, abolition thus brings utopian dreams to bear upon concrete practice, seeking to generate new structures of agency and pointing toward ways in which liberal notions of consent occlude deep forms of structural power and implicit constraint. Students will be asked to take on an activist project as part of the course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM374, FGSS374
Prereq: None

SOC284 The Past Tense

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the past. Grounded in the sociology of memory, it draws from various fields to examine the intersections of biography, history, and memory in popular culture and politics. The course focuses on the nature of memory, and on struggles around it, including debates about memorials and monuments, truth commissions, and PTSD. From memoir to confessions, we will consider how the past gets represented as truth, memory, and story.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC285 The Sociology of Reality TV: Race, Colorism, and Xenophobia

The course will explore the ways in which reality television can help us reflect on how different social identifiers such as race, skin complexion, and ethnicity operate within American culture. For many, reality TV can be easily dismissed as a guilty pleasure, escapism, or "trashy" (e.g., Dehnart, n.d.). While reality television can be labeled as an innocuous pastime, its importance and impact in American culture cannot be overlooked or denied. Moreover, the way this form of entertainment reflects American behaviors and shapes or reaffirms thinking within our society around sociological descriptors like race and culture should be studied. Through a critical lens, we will delve into the ways this genre of television portrays women of color, the audiences who watch reality TV, and whether responsibility exists on the networks who help create these shows.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: AFAM284, CSPL285
Prereq: None

SOC288 The Medium and the Message

Do you like to draw autobiographical comics, record bedroom pop songs, make queer zines, write ChatGPT poetry, choreograph burlesque performances, design and print ugly posters, sew avant-garde garments, create absurdist TikToks, or produce niche podcasts? This seminar is for students who want to think through the sociological content, implications, and impact of their creative work. In the course, students will develop and make substantial progress on a creative project that addresses sociological themes in its form and/or content. Students need not have any formal training, but should have demonstrated experience in their preferred medium. Course texts will address sociological issues surrounding cultural production, including representation, dissemination, and professionalization. Class sessions will be divided between discussion of readings and example work, experimental exercises, workshopping, and student presentations.

To apply for the seminar, students should submit the following: 1) a description of the specific project they wish to develop over the semester, keeping in mind that they will be expected to make and share progress each week; 2) a sample of previous work that demonstrates familiarity with any necessary technology (software, instruments, tools, recording devices, etc.); and 3) a "bibliography" of personal influences (including any relevant readings, creative work, etc.).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC292 Death and Dying at the End of the World

Death looms large over life. The digital has given people unprecedented access to global media focused on death and dying, from far-flung calamities killing thousands to intimate gofundme pages for your friends' cancer treatments. In an age of data-enabled prediction and preemption, death is capricious and untimely, remaining stubbornly resistant to scientific and philosophical certainty, despite ever more complex systems for death management. Meanwhile, circulating discourses of ecological and political catastrophe have proliferated thoughts of genocide, extinction, and planetary death. In this course, we look at contemporary encounters with death and dying at a variety of scales, from the search for death's meaning/a meaningful death, to understanding death as a public feeling and inspiration for political imagination.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC299 The Future Perfect

Sociology is typically preoccupied with the present and, to a lesser extent, the past, favoring empirical methods that aim to reveal a variety of truths: for example, the logics underlying social structures and systems, the causes of social inequality, and the mechanisms by which inequality is reproduced. Where does this leave the future? Despite the persistence of patterns of social life, the future remains always and ultimately undetermined. We cannot know it; we can only imagine, speculate, and fantasize. The future, it seems, belongs to the world of fiction: to novels, films, television shows, and music that offer visions of what it might hold. These visions are sometimes suffused with hope for a changed world and sometimes with anxiety at the prospect of change. What can we learn about the present from images of the future? Might they offer an antidote to suspicions that we are headed toward a future of increased inequality and scarcity and looming environmental catastrophe? What traps might we find ourselves in when we treat the future as a distinct category of time? This course pairs social theory with works of fiction in addressing these questions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151 AND SOC212

SOC300 Queer and Trans Aesthetics

This seminar will consider contemporary trans and queer theory foregrounding race, class, disability, migration, diaspora, indigeneity, and colonization alongside the work of BIPOC queer and trans artists in particular. The course's animating (and unfixable!) questions include: How do artists produce and intervene in understandings of gender and/or sexuality through their work? What does it mean for an artist or viewer to describe an image, object, or performance as "queer" or "trans"? What constitutes a "queer" or "trans" reading of visual culture? How might various formulations of "queer" and "trans" relate to, put pressure on, and/or resist "aesthetics"? What is the relationship between an artist's self-identification and/or their resistance to categorization (e.g., in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, nationality) on the one hand, and audiences' efforts to engage and interpret their art on the other? Put another way: What, if anything, does an artist's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with their art? And what does a viewer's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with how they approach and interpret visual culture? Several artist talks and/or class visits (all virtual) are being organized in conjunction with the seminar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS331, THEA311, AFAM331, AMST326
Prereq: None

SOC302 Paternalism and Social Power

This course will consider the construction of caring and helping in the structuring of social relations. What does helping entail? How does power operate in the velvet glove? What, if anything, lies beyond paternalism? How does social change occur? Competing perspectives on paternalism from within social and political theory will be considered as vehicles for tracing power dynamics in a survey of U.S. social formations related to family, gender, sexuality, race, labor, class, medicine, criminal justice, religion, environmentalism, and international relations.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC307 Authenticity and Perversity in Contemporary American Movies

This course will examine scholarly and popular conceptions of sincerity & perversity; authenticity & inauthenticity in contemporary American movies. How do notions of authenticity function within contemporary culture? What are the various inauthentic others to which authenticity is juxtaposed?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC308 Baby Got Back: Embodiment, Gender, and Sexuality in Black Music

This multimedia course uses a sociocultural approach to explore how black bodies continue to be sized, classed, sexed, and gendered through black musical expression. We will examine black music as a cultural object, both embedded in and responsible for steering national cultures, to argue that black music is indeed a lens through which to examine the struggles, contradictions, and triumphs of black peoples in the U.S. and abroad. Connecting theoretical frameworks of race, embodiment, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexuality with: (1) visual cultures of black bodies in motion (stemming from minstrelsy and chitlin' circuits to musicals and music videos) and (2) a variety of songs written, produced, and/or performed by black musicians (that include but are not limited to: the blues, jazz, rock and roll, rhythm & blues, soul, afrobeat, hip hop, dancehall, pop, soca, hip life, and reggaeton), this class will seek to interrogate how black music creates, replicates, regulates, packages, and distributes identity through a paradigm of production and consumption. We will discuss topics such as commodification, resistance, and representation while listening to artists such as Nina Simone, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Las Crudas, former 2 Live Crew member Luke, Biggie Smalls, Mr. Killa, De La Soul, Lil' Kim, Outkast, Jill Scott, Ayisoba, Big Freedia, Alison Hinds, Nicki Minaj, and Fela Kuti to attempt to understand exactly what type of power (and magic) that music possesses.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC309 America's Lure: The Politics of the Transnational US University

Over the course of the last decade the number of international students traveling to the United States has more than doubled. As of 2016, over a million students travel annually to U.S. campuses. In popular culture, governmental rhetoric, and statements from university administrators, this movement has been ascribed to the "lure" of American institutions of higher education and the knowledge, prestige, and futures they are thought to provide access to while simultaneously providing evidence of the successful internationalization of the U.S. university. Students will engage queer, feminist, postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race studies as we historicize and theorize this phenomenon while grappling with the transnational dynamics of the U.S. university from its founding as a central institution of settler colonialism in the 17th century through to the current moment of the so-called global, neoliberal university.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC313 Time, Masks, Mirrors: Aging in America

Longevity is almost universally wished for, but its actual accomplishment may also invite fear, even dread, depending on the context in which it occurs. We will study the socio-cultural meanings of aging in the US as they are informed by history (collective and personal), cultural background, social scripts, caregiving relationships, institutional support/constraint, and current conceptualizations of the life course and the "aging" mind and body that often rely heavily on categorization and vocabulary associated with biomedicine. In addition, we will explore the idea of age in relation to sustainability and disposability as it is applied to dwellings, objects, the natural environment, and even persons. Enrolled students will be introduced to qualitative methods and analysis of qualitative data through conducting a series of interviews with an elder living in the local community that focus on the relationship between place and well-being over the life course, culminating in a record that can be shared with others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC315 The Health of Communities

Our focus will be on understanding the role of social factors (e.g., income, work environment, social cohesion, food, transportation systems) in determining the health risks of individuals; considering the efficacy, appropriateness, and ethical ramifications of various public health interventions; and learning about the contemporary community health center model of care in response to the needs of vulnerable populations. In this overview, we explore the history of social medicine, the importance of language in public health efforts to conceptualize and frame health concerns, the complexity of any categorization of persons in discussions of health and illness, ethical issues related to the generation and utilization of community-based research, the role of place and the importance of administrative and cultural boundaries in the variability of health risk, and the idea of just health care. Enrolled students serve as research assistants to preceptors at Middletown's Community Health Center (CHC) & Moses Weitzman Research Institute.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.25
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: CSPL314, STS315
Prereq: None

SOC316 Community Research Seminar

Small teams of students will carry out research projects submitted by local community groups and agencies. These may involve social science, natural science, or arts and humanities themes. The first two weeks of the course will be spent studying the theory and practice of community research. Working with the community groups themselves, the teams will then design and implement the research projects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: ENVS316
Prereq: None

SOC318 Social Science, Black Life: Wells-Barnett, Du Bois, and Hurston's Empirical Experiments

This class has two interrelated areas of focus: first, the racist habits of imag(in)ing blackness's presumed racial-sexual difference that preoccupied social science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and second, the formative role that social scientific research and methods played in black people's quests for institutional inclusion during this same period. In their early years, canonical sociology and anthropology consistently proved unable to capture the beauty and complexity in black life, instead lending empirical authority to cultural ways of seeing blackness as inherently pathological. A counter-discourse of black expression took shape, attempting to overcome the negative impact that dominant empirical thought might have on black peoples' struggle for normative citizenship. Focusing particularly on the careers of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, we will explore the contradictory relationship that subsequently emerged between blackness and institutional power--discernible in empiricism's primacy during the long era of postbellum black inclusion. Rather than seeking evidence of black intellectuals' departure from empiricism and its attendant violences, we will explore the messiness of their efforts to experiment with and imagine beyond their misrepresentation and erasure in dominant empirical discourses. Indeed, black artists and intellectuals sometimes recapitulated the violence of empiricist paradigms and their enabling truth claims despite their sound political intentions. In considering the nexus of social science and black life in this period, then, we will also consider the intramural politics of racialized gender, the myriad costs of institutional incorporation, and the stubborn durability of epistemological authority. Secondary texts include works by Hazel Carby, Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Gaines, Julian Go, Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Reiland Rabaka, Michel-Rolph Truillot, Autumn Womack, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS354, AFAM354
Prereq: None

SOC319 Theories of Capitalism

Capitalism has profoundly shaped world history, acting as one of the primary drivers of social change, and working to shape a tremendous variety of social institutions ranging from colonialism to our sense of time. This course takes a critical approach to the study of capitalism, looking at the ways capitalism has intersected with and transformed the nature of social oppression (particularly in relation to nation, race, gender, and sexuality), as well as the ways it works to shape everyday consciousness. Historical changes within capitalism will be explored, considering particularly the rise of corporate capitalism and of contemporary neoliberalism. We will examine a wide variety of theoretical approaches to capitalism, taking Marx's thought as a jumping-off point for elaboration and critique. We will conclude by considering alternatives to capitalism that have been proposed in both historical and contemporary contexts, together with an examination of practical efforts to implement these possibilities.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: AMST309
Prereq: SOC151 OR AMST174 OR AMST178

SOC321 Disgusting? Revolting!

Who or what do we find utterly repugnant? Are we the nasty, vile ones? Is it possible that we are unconsciously attracted to that which disgusts us? What might it take to turn disgust into desire, and vice versa? In what ways might disgust indicate not only disruption or transgression, but some kind of threat and alternative to the status quo? What might be lost or gained when the disgusting clean up their acts, or are shown to have been respectable all along? In this course we will explore the politics of filth, particularly in terms of the desires, attitudes, identities, and behaviors that elicit disgust. We will consider how disgust infuses political ideology--i.e., how people understand and approach the social groups that disgust them (for example, racialized immigrants, queers, fat people, and drug addicts), but also the wealthy, the privileged, the "basket of deplorables." We will also explore the psychoanalytic relation of disgust to desire.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Prereq: None

SOC322 The Sociology of Nina Simone

An artist, activist, and visionary, Nina Simone possessed both a talent and political platform that continues to permeate discussions inside and outside the walls of academia. Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, Simone was trained as a classical pianist that would eventually travel the world to perform music that encompassed the struggles of black life. This course acknowledges that her music, with pieces such as "Mississippi Goddam" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" undoubtedly made social, cultural, and political contributions to American society. However, much of Simone's personal life, including her battles with racism, sexism, and mental illness, as well as her relationships with her contemporaries, like Lorraine Hansberry and Miriam Makeba, is often eclipsed by and not considered alongside with her body of work. This course will examine Nina Simone as a whole person, wrought with contradictions, that poured her life experiences into her music, often at the expense of her own success. This class will: sociologically examine the emergence of such a person by interrogating the social environments that impacted her views on social justice; deploy black feminist and womanist analytical frameworks to deeply understand how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy may have taken a toll on Simone's career, but ignited her passion to speak truth to power; and utilize cultural and sociological paradigms of framing, stratification, and symbolic interaction to fully understand the sociology of Nina Simone.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC323 "Racing" Across Africa

Is Africa post-racial? Have you wondered how someone becomes Black/African, white, ethnic, and/or native and its implicit hierarchies, which scholars refer to as racialization? When you think about race and racism, does Post-Independence (PI) Africa come to mind? If not, why is PI Africa removed from our understanding of race? How can we think about Africa today as always undergoing processes of racial imperialism and how does it intersect with sexuality, gender, and class? Lastly, how do we conceptualize Post-Independence Africa in relation to the African diaspora?

We will go from Ghana to Kenya, Nigeria to South Africa, to understand how race is articulated in these spaces during colonization and after formal colonization has ended. We will also gain theoretical language needed to refute raceless logic. These processes will help us recognize why PI Africa is perpetually marginalized within a globally racialized capitalist economy. This course will contribute to thinking about forms of solidarity in our own lives toward visions of decoloniality, equity, and justice for those racialized as Black, especially in Africa.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC324 Black Girl Magic?: Survival and Speculative Fiction in the Social World

"Black Girl Magic?" explores and examines the sociological origins, usages, and deployments of the now-popular hashtag. Shortened from "#BlackGirlsAreMagic," coined by CaShawn Thompson in 2013, #BlackGirlMagic has seen its share of celebration and controversy. Used by and for figures such as former First Lady Michelle Obama and Janelle Monae, the hashtag appears almost everywhere to provide exemplars for the resilience of Black women and girls. However, some critics have questioned trending characteristics among those who have been branded with the hashtag--cisgender, well-to-do, fit/thin, non-disabled, and/or famous--and have asked since the beginning: To whom exactly does this phrase belong? Who does it include? And why should we use it? This course aims to survey all those questions and more. It will highlight Black women, trans and gender non-conforming writers, as well as sociologists and those not officially affiliated with the field, to deepen our understanding of Black life experiences in a global social world. We will dive into and deconstruct what we know about concepts such as "survival," "joy," "imagination," and "community" via Black feminist thought, queer/quare studies, popular culture, political science, speculative fiction, and cultural sociology.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM324, AFAM322
Prereq: SOC151 OR AFAM151

SOC326 Race, Fantasy and Fetish

What role do fantasy and fetish play in the making and unmaking of race? How might fantasy and fetish disrupt and reinforce power differentials in surprising or unexpected ways? From comic book heroes to `race play¿, this course explores how bodies, relationships, and space itself are fetishized in the racial imagination. It moves beyond the basic observation that race is socially constructed to consider how fantasy, desire, and fetish render such constructions volatile and spectacular, yet also banal and predictable.

We will discuss the historical and social context of race as both imagined and imaginary in relation to western fantasies of the self and object others. This course draws on texts from race, queer, and postcolonial theory, along with popular material, including fantasy fiction and film, to highlight the fantastical underpinnings of the everyday realities of racial difference.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: SOC151 AND SOC240

SOC328 Experiments in Public Life: Creating and Presenting Socially Conscious Music

This course will revolve around examining and participating in this realm of music-making through different lenses. We will examine varied relationships a creator can have to the issue/stance to which the art relates, varied ways the art can be presented, varied ways of identifying and reaching different target audiences, and varied potential outcomes. Students will create work in response to a diverse set of prompts designed both to refine their individual goals of artistic and community engagement and to challenge them to create outside of those zones. In addition to individual and collaborative creative work, there will be readings and listening assignments encompassing a genre-diverse array of music (ranging from Olivier Messiaen to Charles Mingus to Nina Simone to Public Enemy, to name just a few) accompanied by some brief reflective writing assignments. Work created in the course will be shared with the community (defined multifacetedly) in a variety of ways online and in person, with the students bearing much of that organizational and curatorial responsibility.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CSPL
Identical With: CSPL208
Prereq: None

SOC352 Race, Immigration, and the U.S. Empire

Did we all enter this country on equal grounds? How do our racialized ethnicities, immigration histories, gender, sexuality, and class impact our position in the United States? When you think about immigration, do black immigrants come to mind? This course provides an overview of critical assessments of immigrant communities within the U.S. empire. Theories of institutional racism, white supremacy, and ethnic fallacies are placed at the center of the conceptual framework of the course. Its aim is to demystify immigrant success narratives by relaying the historical, legal, political, and capitalist structures that affect access to upward mobility for immigrant groups and their descendants. Students will learn how black American, black immigrant, Latinx, Asian, indigenous, white eastern European, and white western European communities (including white colonial oppressors), and those at the intersection are grafted within an anti-black, global racial hierarchy that informs their current position in a settler-colonial empire.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC355 The Personal Is Social

How do social forces show up in our everyday lives? Which forces grab our attention, and why? When are we more inclined to see something as individual rather than social? What kinds of conclusions can we reasonably draw about the social world based on our individual experiences? In this seminar, students will read texts that use personal experience as a foundation for sociological observation, reflection, and insight. We will spend time thinking about the appeal and limitations of various methods, surveying a range of approaches to incorporating personal experience into scholarship, including memoir, autotheory, and autoethnography. Students will practice these kinds of writing throughout the semester, culminating in a final paper that blends personal writing with sociological analysis.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC364 Cultural Logics of Capitalism

This course will explore intersections between capitalist political economy and socio-cultural trends in contemporary everyday life. This includes a focus on various, often competing, theoretical formulations that seek to interpret cultural trends and cultural politics and discern the degree to which such trends undergird and/or undermine so-called "logics" of capitalist political economy.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: SOC151

SOC399G Advanced Research Seminar: Introduction to Critical University Studies

The university is in crisis, or so we are often told. With college and university budgets rapidly shrinking, tuition and student debt are increasing exponentially, especially for women and students of color. And yet, we're here. Students, instructors, and staff continue to look to the university as a productive space for thinking and working. As an academic field dedicated to a collective engagement with the ways power constitutes bodies, knowledge, and ways of being in the world, sociology is a key venue for contending with these processes. This course will introduce students to the emerging field of critical university studies through a feminist, queer, and anti-racist frame. What, we will ask, does it look like to think in and about the university at this historical moment? What does it mean to consider the university's history in relationship to power and the nation-state? What are the gender, sexual, class, and racial politics of knowledge production? And how can we most productively take up the university itself as an object of scholarly inquiry?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC399H Hot Mamas: Black Women, Sexuality, and Body Size

Black women, no matter where they were born or currently live in the world, deploy survival strategies that propel them past perceived deviances and into discursive spaces of dynamic personhood. This is especially true for fat Black women and how they navigate their respective identities in the areas of social, physical, and mental health; socioeconomic status; and beauty culture. In this class, we will interrogate these areas alongside Blackness, womanhood, and sexuality to fully consider the implications of body size as a substantial category of intersectional analysis. By bringing medical and sociological studies into conversations with political and feminist theory, while also engaging with literary pieces and popular culture, this interdisciplinary course aims to equip all of us with a deeper understanding of sexuality and body size and their significance in the lives of Black women. We will journey our way through this course using the works of Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, theorists such as Michel Foucault, sociologists such as Samantha Kwan, political scientists such as Cathy Cohen, lawyers such as Dorothy Roberts and Paul Campos, and writers such as Lucille Clifton and Alice Walker. In addition, we will bring our lived experiences and proximity to popular culture (magazines, music, films, and online resources such as personal blogs) to stake out our own truths and fill out any gaps that we believe are present in the literature. The class will mix lecture, class discussion, group presentations, and small-group work to advance mastery of the material.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC399I Advanced Research Seminar: Assembling the Self

This advanced research seminar is open to sociology majors in their senior year or in the second semester of their junior year and fulfills the capstone requirement for the major. The course is divided in two halves. In the first half, we will read a variety of autoethnographic texts, in which the authors use personal experience as a foundation for sociological reflection and insight. We will spend time thinking about the political and methodological benefits and limitations of autoethnography, surveying a range of approaches to incorporating one's experience into scholarship, and attending to the ways that autoethnographic texts respond to existing research and theory. In the second half of the class, students will develop a substantial and original autoethnographic essay, with class sessions focused on workshopping and presenting writing in progress.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC399K Advanced Research Seminar: Law & Society

In this course we will explore law from a sociological perspective, in relation to the historical, political, and cultural contexts within which it exists.

- We will tackle the question, what is law?

- We will talk about the relationship between law and justice.

- We will discuss social phenomena as legal constructions. Who is a person? What constitutes a religion? What is gender? What is commerce? What is free speech? These questions find myriad answers in different bodies of thought, are understood and acted upon in a variety of ways by different social groups, and gain different levels of political salience in different societies and at different times. As matters concerning the organization of public life, they are also, and inevitably, framed as "legal problems" and make their way to courts. We will examine how courts construct social phenomena through the lens of several historical cases.

- We will talk about law and American government--the historical evolution of the relationship between the branches of government, and the changing role and politicization of the Supreme Court.

- We will learn about courtroom exchanges, and how race, gender, and class play out in a typical American courthouse.

- We will explore law as a professional field, and discuss the educational and professional formations of its major actors.

This course will involve writing a research paper.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: SOC151

SOC399L Advanced Research Seminar: The Social Body

This advanced research seminar is open to sociology majors in their senior year or in the second semester of their junior year and fulfills the capstone requirement for the major. The course is divided in two halves. In the first half, we will survey topics, perspectives, and approaches within the sociology of the body--a disciplinary subfield that examines the human body as a site where the social materializes and is rendered legible--as well as considering more generally the craft of academic scholarship. Substantive topics will include ADHD, anorexia, pain/pleasure and disability, and racial/ethnic cosmetic surgery. This overview will serve as a foundation for the second half of the course, in which students will develop a substantial and original research essay, with class sessions focused on workshopping and presenting writing in progress.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC399M Abolitionist University Studies

This course explores historical materialist theorizations of the practices and future possibilities of the U.S. university as a tool of social reproduction and space of potentially revolutionary thought. In so doing, the readings, assignments, and discussion will be inspired by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's provocation to reinterpret abolitionism as "not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society." Students will consider how conventional renderings of the university in higher education studies, critical university studies, and the popular cultural imaginary are predicated upon an often romanticized and fundamentally limited geographic and historical understanding of the work of colleges and universities. In response, the course cultivates a more capacious conceptualization of the historical and contemporary function of the university as a social form. In taking up abolitionism as both a method and critical analytic, the course will challenge students to imagine the revolutionary possibilities of an abolition university that aligns itself with movements beyond the institution, while reflecting on the particular importance and challenge of enacting such a vision in our current political moment.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS311, EDST399
Prereq: None

SOC399R Advanced Research Seminar: I Write What I Like

Love letters, propaganda, admission essays, manifestos, research papers, memoir, profiles, invitations, journaling, tweets, and texts. We write a lot. Whether it's grammar and syntax or word counts and page limits, we do so with rules in mind that help shape what gets said. We fret over whether to write in first or third person, what type of citations to use, and whether we have enough evidence. Too often rules are imposed before we've sorted through our thoughts, let alone what we want to say about them. As we think about these formal and informal rules, we'll consider the specificities and usefulness of various forms of writing, and how each presents constraints that open up or foreclose different kinds of thoughts about society.

We'll think about how writers, activists, and academics approach writing to move us in different ways. We'll experiment with and repurpose diverse genres as we develop our own approaches to writing as an essential tool of social analysis.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: None

SOC401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SOC404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SOC405 Sociology Thesis Seminar

The purpose of the seminar is to help senior sociology majors develop their senior thesis projects by introducing them to the conceptual challenges and practical problems of sociological research. The seminar meetings will be devoted primarily to helping students advance their own research projects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Prereq: (SOC151 AND SOC212 AND SOC202)

SOC406 Sociology Thesis Seminar

SOC407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SOC408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SOC409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

SOC420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

SOC420A Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U

SOC465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

SOC467 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC468 Independent Study, Undergraduate

SOC469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

SOC491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SOC492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

2024-2025 Edition

Academic Catalog

Sociology (SOC)

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