11 - 20 of 228 results for: SOC

Deep disagreement pervades our democracy, from arguments over issues ranging from foreign policy, free speech, and reparations to college admissions policy and the professionalization of college athletics. Loud voices drown out discussion. Open-mindedness, humility, and critical thinking seem in short supply among politicians, citizens, and other residents alike. Yet constructive disagreement is an essential feature of a democratic society. This class explores and models respectful, civil disagreement. Each week features scholars who disagree - sometimes quite strongly - about major policy issues. Students will have the opportunity to probe those disagreements, understand why they persist, and improve their own understanding of the facts and values that underlie them. The course may be taken for one or two units. The basic, one-unit class is open to all Stanford students, with other members of the Stanford community welcome to audit individual classes. The requirements are to do readings in advance of each class, attend, and listen attentively and critically. Because the topics are different, students who took the course in 2023-24 may enroll this year as well. A limited number of undergraduates may take a second unit of credit. Students enrolled in the two unit course will participate in weekly small group discussion seminars about the topics discussed by guest presenters in the course that week. The discussion seminars will be led by peer facilitators, with the goals of developing critical thinking skills and discourse skills, such as active listening and curiosity. The peer facilitators are undergraduate students who have completed training in dialogue facilitation. Each discussion seminar will have a maximum of 10 students. If interest in discussion seminars exceeds the number offered, students will be chosen by lottery.

We live in a democracy that's supposed to heed the voices of everyone, not just the voices of the rich and privileged, but the voices of everyone. For a host of reasons, the U.S. has not lived up to this commitment. This is partly because we lack a viable technology for "listening to the people" and understanding what they are doing, thinking, and feeling. We rely on forced-choice surveys that provide a superficial portrait of people's lives and thoughts; we rely on social media that amplify the voices of an unrepresentative few; we rely on focus groups that are highly selective and distorted by group dynamics; we rely on small-scale qualitative studies based on convenience samples; and we rely on qualitative journalism (e.g., stories written by reporters) that are based on a small number of highly unrepresentative interviews. What, then, are the people actually thinking, doing, and wanting? We simply don't know. The purpose of this course is to assist with building out a new fielding of the American Voices Project (AVP) - the only nationally representative immersive-interviewing study in the world. The express purpose of the AVP: To listen to the voices of a representative sample of the U.S. by asking them to "tell the story of their life" and to reflect on their lives, challenges, beliefs, and hopes. This new fielding will be administered in approximately 8 months, so we're in the thick of deciding on the questions, how the interviewing and data analysis will happen, how confidentiality will be protected, and how we'll collaborate with journalists to listen to the voices of America in real time - as crisis after crisis continue to course through the country. The course will provide a bevy of opportunities to join up with teams and labs that are working on these problems. We will lead off, however, with an introduction to why all of this matters. We will examine how authentic democracies depend on listening to the "voices of the people," what we can learn from listening, and how and why current efforts to do so fall short. We will examine why talk is cathartic, what it reveals (i.e., the "dark matter" of speech), and what it conceals. After this introduction, students will have an opportunity to join a work team of their choosing, with the teams taking on such jobs as (a) testing the interview guide, (b) testing whether AI interviewing might be usable for some interviews, (c) building tools for real-time analysis of the AVP text data, (d) building new approaches to deidentifying the data and protecting confidentiality, and much more. This will all happen in the Center on Poverty and Inequality's beautiful building.

An overview of the major forms of inequality in American society, their causes and consequences. Special attention will devoted to to public policy associated with inequality.

This course will trace China's winding path to the present through two radically different periods: the revolutionary changes and upheavals in the middle of the 20th century, and the shift to market reform and rapid economic development after 1980. We will examine the formation of China's first modern nation-state out of a long period of internal war, and how that form of government has evolved in the decades since. The main focus of the first half of the course is on the Mao era, and in particular the two famous upheavals of that period - the Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine, and the decade-long upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. In the second half, we will explore the surprising shift toward market reform and openness to the outside world after 1980, and the economic growth and social changes that followed. In addition to accessible readings, the course will feature documentary films, dramatic productions by Chinese directors, memoirs and fiction by Chinese authors, and classroom discussion. Students will gain an in depth background for understanding China's role in current world affairs, and a good foundation for further coursework on contemporary China.

The seminar introduces students to major themes connected to the immigrant experience, including identity, education, assimilation, transnationalism, political membership, and intergroup relations. There will also be some attention given to research methodology. The seminar addresses these themes through reading ethnographies that document the everyday experience of immigrants and immigrant communities, broadly defined, in the United States. The course readings primarily come from more contemporary ethnographic research, but it will also include a sampling of ethnographies that examine the experience of previous waves of immigrants. Student participation will include in-class discussions of readings, short written responses to readings, and a final paper in which students draw on original ethnographic research that they conduct during the quarter. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to identify the social, political, and economic forces that shape the immigrant experience. More importantly, students will understand HOW these forces enter the immigrant experience in everyday life.

Over the past few decades, social movements have increasingly relied on social movement participants leveraging internet technologies in mobilization, coordination, and public outreach to assist in their movement goals. How have new online tools such as social media and digital connectivity changed the processes of contemporary social movements? This course uses a sociological perspective to examine the ways social movements have adapted to online technologies to critically think about how the internet has altered traditional forms of social movement mobilization. The first half of the course is an introduction and review of traditional social movement literatures, while the second half is focused on different contemporary social movements where the internet played an important role, including the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ equality, feminism and the #MeToo movement, and most recently, the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Students will be encouraged to think about the ways in which social movement processes have been accelerated and/or changed due to the effects of online technologies.

Democracy is at a turning point, both in the United States and around the world. This timely course explores the state of democratic institutions, the role of technology in public life, the global youth mental health crisis, and the growing influence of AI. Join students from across the Stanford community to hear from leaders in politics, technology, business, and media as we examine the forces shaping our future.

This Introductory Seminar reviews the history of social network studies, investigates how networks have changed over the past hundred years and asks how new technologies will impact them. We will draw from scholarly publications, popular culture and personal experience as ways to approach this central aspect of the human experience.

Where does the food you eat come from? How does it get to your plate? Where does it go when you don't finish it? And why are those particular items on your plate in the first place? How and what we eat is a vastly overlooked part of everyday life, and yet comes with huge personal, societal, and environmental effects, both positive and (quite often) negative. But this isn't indicative of personal moral failings or ignorance - rather, the food system was designed this way. And it leaves many of us without choice or consent around what we put into our bodies and how our actions impact those around us, thereby exacerbating social and health inequities. This class will uncover the secret workings of the global food system and introduce students to movements and efforts towards creating a more just food future for all. We will center on the concept of 'food justice,' which includes all ideas and practices that strive to eliminate exploitation and oppression within and beyond the food system. This trajectory will take us through understandings of economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological life, both now and in the past, providing students with a unique opportunity to gain interdisciplinary knowledge of food systems. For instance, we will learn about how historical and modern-day activists and scholars draw on movements for economic, gender, racial, climate, and environmental justice, and explore the possibilities for both reformative and transformative food politics. Finally, because food production, consumption, and activism are all highly tangible practices, the class will engage in field trips to the Stanford O'Donohue Family Farm, Stanford Food Institute's Teaching Kitchen, and a local Bay Area farm to get hands-on experience with what it means to eat more ethically.