71 - 80 of 212 results for: SOC

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.

Why do some songs become popular, but not others? Why are music genres that were wildly popular in the 1950s no longer popular today? Trends and fads and can be found nearly everywhere in our daily lives movie tropes, skirt lengths, styles of shoes, internet memes, hot stock-picks all of these go in and out of fashion. But, why should they? Did something change? And if so¿what? This course seeks to understand how and why things become (un)popular. The course begins with early 20th century theories on the massification and commodification of culture and traces development of this literature over time. Topics covered include propaganda, social influence, and significant responses to questions such as: What constitutes high/low culture? Does popular culture manifest--"from the bottom-up", for the people by the people--or is popular culture dictated--"from the top down", by elites and commercial interests? To what extent do social networks (and the status and power of the people within them) influence these relationships? How is popular culture received, interpreted, and used? Today, the media landscape looks significantly different than it did in the early 20th century, and in the final portion of the course we will consider the extent to which new technologies, media platforms, hyper-focused advertising, and cluster-based similarity algorithms have impacted the way we think about and answer these questions. In the final portion of the course, we will critically examine active and ongoing debates in the literature related to this question and produce a final paper that contributes to the discussion. No final exam.

This course is about the distribution of power in contemporary democratic societies, and especially in the US: who governs? Is there a ``power elite,'' whose preferences dominate public policy making? Or, does policy reflect a wide range of interests? What is the relationship between income and power? What are the political consequences of increasing income inequality? How do income differences across racial and ethnic groups affect the quality of their representation? What are effective remedies for unequal influence? Finally, which institutions move democratic practice furthest towards full democratic equality? This course will address these questions, focusing first on local distributions of power, and then considering the implications of inequality in state and national politics. nStudents will have the opportunity to study income inequality using income and labor force surveys in a mid-term assignment. Then, in a final paper, students will conduct an empirical examination of the implications of income inequality for American democracy.

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 America¿s 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. nnnThus 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. nnnThe 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? nnnSuch 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.

Methods for analyzing and evaluating quantitative data in sociological research. Students will be taught how to run and interpret multivariate regressions, how to test hypotheses, and how to read and critique published data analyses.

From your daily cup(s) of coffee to the ¿War on Drugs,¿ drugs touch the lives of most people. Yet, how societies deal with drug use and abuse change throughout time. In this course, we will look at drug use and abuse through a sociological lens, exploring how micro (personal), meso (interactional), and macro (structural) level forces underpin the meanings, experiences, and policies associated with drug use and abuse in the United States. Beyond this, we will examine how these forces contribute to persistent systems of inequality among different groups. This will not serve as a ¿how to¿ course, but one in which you will be asked to critically examine the role of drugs and their effects on society. By the end of this course, students should be able to:

This course examines the social underpinnings of historical and modern-day policing. We will analyze trends in policing practices in the US through time, and ask how ¿ and to what effect ¿ police have become enmeshed in the social fabric of American life. Students will be exposed to some of the methods social scientists use to investigate society¿s most pressing issues as we examine the intersections of policing with other institutions (e.g. education, technology, and health) through both popular journalism and rigorous academic research.