1 - 10 of 59 results for: SOC

This course to get students to think like a sociologist; to use core concepts and theories from the field of sociology to make sense of the most pressing issues of our time: race and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; family; education; social class and economic inequality; social connectedness; social movements; and immigration. The course will draw heavily on the research and writing of Stanford¿s own sociologist.

Preference to freshmen. The conditions under which social protest occurs and the emergence, success, and viability of contemporary social movements. Examples include women's civil rights, ecology, and antiwar and anti-globilization movements in the U.S. and elsewhere. Sociological theories to explain the timing, location, and causes of mobilization; how researchers evaluate these theories. Comparison of tactics, trajectories, and outcomes.

Limited to students participating in the Alternative Spring Break program. See http://asb.stanford.edu for more information.

Not only a legal status, citizenship forms a major concern for political sociologists interested in questions of membership, exclusion, redistribution, and struggles over the boundaries of collective identity. Citizenship is in essence membership in a political community that entails rights and duties, and structures a tripartite relationship between the individual, community and state. The institutions of citizenship include formal and bureaucratic rules of eligibility ¿ but also informal institutions such as identity and belonging. Throughout the course, students are exposed to key issues of the sociology of citizenship such as the historically different paths of men, women, minority groups and immigrants into citizenship, the contested development of rights and duties, the regulation of population, as well as insurgency and collective attempts to rearticulate the terms of the ¿contract¿ with the state. Israel, the USA, France and Germany are used as empirical illustrations. At the conclusion of the course students will know how to utilize the analytic framework of citizenship in order to analyze a wide range of political phenomena in contemporary societies.

(Graduate students register for 220.) Forming ties, developing norms, status, conformity, deviance, social exchange, power, and coalition formation; important traditions of research have developed from the basic theories of these processes. Emphasis is on understanding basic theories and drawing out their implications for change in a broad range of situations, families, work groups, and friendship groups.

The effects of schools and schooling on individuals, the stratification system, and society. Education as socializing individuals and as legitimizing social institutions. The social and individual factors affecting the expansion of schooling, individual educational attainment, and the organizational structure of schooling.

(Graduate students register for 236) Major issues and debates. Topics include: historical perspectives on the origins of law; rationality and legal sanctions; normative decision making and morality; cognitive decision making; crime and deviance; the law in action versus the law on the books; organizational responses to law in the context of labor and employment; the roles of lawyers, judges, and juries; and law and social change emphasizing the American civil rights movement.

(Graduate students register for 249.) Recent research and theory on the urban underclass, including evidence on the concentration of African Americans in urban ghettos, and the debate surrounding the causes of poverty in urban settings. Ethnic/racial conflict, residential segregation, and changes in the family structure of the urban poor.

Family change from historical, social, demographic, and legal perspectives. Extramarital cohabitation, divorce, later marriage, interracial marriage, and same-sex cohabitation. The emergence of same-sex marriage as a political issue. Are recent changes in the American family really as dramatic as they seem? Theories about what causes family systems to change.