71 - 80 of 228 results for: SOC

(Graduate students register for 270). Sociologists seek to understand how society works, specifically: how social life is organized, changed, and maintained. Sociological theory provides hypotheses for explaining social life. All empirical research in sociology is enriched by, and has some basis in, sociological theories. This course introduces students to the earliest sociological theories and the thinkers who developed them. Specifically, we will discuss the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. We will compare and contrast how they thought about important modern-day social realities such as capitalism, racism, crime, religion, and social cohesion. We will consider how these early theories and thinkers influence the way sociologists think about and study the social world today.

What makes us a person over time? How do we feel in our bodies? Are our bodies the way how powerful systems make us into persons? Can we resist incorporation through our bodies? How do bodily images and bodily feelings become circulated in a way that shapes how you or I might feel or become a person? In 1938, Marcel Mauss delivered a lecture "the category of the person" which argued that "the person" was an eminently cultural category. In doing so, he pointed to the fact that we are not born persons but become persons over our life-cycles, often through a set of both sacred and secular rituals. Others have subsequently pointed to the racialized, classed and gendered dimensions of how one becomes a person - social recognition of that personhood is also far from given but can act to keep us in a place we do not wish to be. This class explores three themes: 1) the life-passage and how we become persons through rituals, focusing in on youth, parenting and death; 2) how bodies can become the site of power and resistance and how gendered and racialized bodies are inhabited; 3) how "figures of personhood" are circulated as commoditized goods. Readings and discussions will focus on global contexts rather than only North American ones. Students are encouraged to learn about fundamental concepts without assuming that the how they work in the society, that some have been born in, and that they are all learning within, is universally applicable. The emphasis is instead that every society is produced through histories, cultural concepts, structures of power, and global circulation and movements. No prior knowledge is required. Students will come out of the class equipped with knowledge about multiple communities and structures and analytical skills of comparison and discussion of cultural and historical phenomena. The class is fully a seminar led class (no lectures), and students will learn (facilitated by the instructor) how to close-read social and anthropological theory and ethnographic work, and how to have complex open-ended conversations about this material. Students will learn over the course of the class to be able to distill insights from several different contexts and theories into their own writing.

This course examines the ways in which higher education structures and policies interact with gender, gender identity, and other characteristics in the United States, around the world, and over time. Attention is paid to how changes in those structures and policies relate to access to, experiences in, and outcomes of higher education by gender. Students can expect to gain an understanding of theories and perspectives from the social sciences relevant to an understanding of the role of higher education in relation to structures of gender differentiation and hierarchy. Topics include undergraduate and graduate education; identity and sexuality; gender and science; gender and faculty; and feminist scholarship and pedagogy.

Today we interact with our friends and enemies, our team partners and romantic partners, and our organizations and societies, all through computational systems. How do we design these social computing systems - platforms for social media, online communities, and collaboration - to be effective and responsible? This course covers design patterns for social computing systems and the foundational ideas that underpin them.

Through an overview of China's distinctive economic institutions, political system, and growth model, this course provides a framework for understanding the country's remarkable economic advance and rapidly changing prospects. Among the topics covered are China's corporate sector, both state and private, its walled-off financial system, the state's problematic fiscal structure, widening social inequalities, and the global impact of China's economy. The course culminates with an assessment of the country's current economic and political challenges. Same as OSPBEIJ 20. Students may not earn credit for both OSPBEIJ 20 and Sociology 175/275.

How do neighborhoods come to be? How and why do they change? What is the role of power, money, race, immigration, segregation, culture, government, and other forces? In this course, students will interrogate these questions using literatures from sociology, geography, and political science, along with archival, observational, interview, and cartographic (GIS) methods. Students will work in small groups to create content (e.g., images, audio, and video) for a self-guided neighborhood tour, which will be added to a mobile app and/or website.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the way crime has been defined and punished in the United States. Recent social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives have drawn attention to the problem of mass incarceration and officer-involved shootings of people of color. These movements have underscored the centrality of the criminal justice system in defining citizenship, race, and democracy in America. How did our country get here? This course provides a social scientific perspective on Americas past and present approach to crime and punishment. Readings and discussions focus on racism in policing, court processing, and incarceration; the social construction of crime and violence; punishment among the privileged; the collateral consequences of punishment in poor communities of color; and normative debates about social justice, racial justice, and reforming the criminal justice system. Students will learn to gather their own knowledge and contribute to normative debates through a field report assignment and an op-ed writing assignment.

This course is an exploration. Most generally, its aim is to identify distinguishing features of good diverse communities and articulate them well enough to offer principles or guidelines for how to design and manage such communities - all with a particular focus on educational communities like schools, universities, academic disciplines, etc., but with the hope that such principles might generalize to other kinds of organizations and the broader society. The readings range from those on the origins of human communities and social identities to those on intergroup trust building. They also aim to embed our discussions in the major diversity issues of the day, or example, what's in the news about campus life. Thus the course has a practical purpose: to develop testable ideas for improving the comfort level, fairness and goodness-for-all of identity diverse communities--especially in educational settings. The course also has a basic science purpose: to explore the psychological significance of community. Is there a psychological need for community? Is there something about a need for community that can't be reduced to other needs, for example, for a gender, racial or sexual-orientation identity? How strong is the need for community against other needs? What kinds of human groupings can satisfy it? In meeting this need, can membership in one community substitute for membership in others? What do people need from communities in order to thrive in them? Do strong diverse communities dampen intergroup biases? Can strong community loyalty mitigate identity tensions within communities? Such questions, the hope is, will help us develop a more systematic understanding of the challenges and opportunities inherent in diverse human communities.

Formulating a research question, developing hypotheses, probability and non-probability sampling, developing valid and reliable measures, qualitative and quantitative data, choosing research design and data collection methods, challenges of making causal inference, and criteria for evaluating the quality of social research. Emphasis is on how social research is done, rather than application of different methods. Limited enrollment; preference to Sociology and Urban Studies majors, and Sociology coterms.