31 - 40 of 264 results for: SOC

This seminar asks students to adopt a sociological understanding of Asian Americans by exploring the "edge cases" of this vast population. Students will engage with academic works to inform and fuel reflection and dialogue about the experiences of Asian undocumented immigrants, adoptees, refugees, and more. We will build on this academic understanding through our engagement with films, journalistic pieces, and guest speakers to contextualize these experiences. We will not only learn who they are, but where they are situated in the social fabric of the U.S. Assignments will include short reflection memos and a small research project. This course will require students to simultaneously focus on both individual biographies and macro processes. Students will be prompted to connect the lived experiences of their friends, family, and peers with a body of works that tell the multi-faceted story of the Asian American community. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to situate the unique nature of Asian American experiences at the margins within broader social processes, complicating their understandings of race and immigration.

The sociological approach to production, distribution, consumption, and markets. The impact of norms, power, social structure, and institutions on the economy. Comparison of classic and contemporary approaches to the economy among social science disciplines. Topics: consumption, labor markets, organization of professions such as law and medicine, the economic role of informal networks, industrial organization -- including the structure and history of the computer and popular music industries, business alliances, the platform economy and capitalism in non-Western societies.

The course examines how the international community has fared in promoting and protecting human rights in the world, with an emphasis on the role of the United Nations. The course will begin with an overview of debates about the state of the international human rights system in the contemporary world, and then examine how international society has addressed the challenges of implementing universal human rights principles in different local contexts across different issues. The specific rights issues examined include genocide, children's rights, labor rights, transitional justice, women's rights, indigenous rights, NGOs, and the complicated relationship between the US and global human rights. The course will feature video conference/guest lecture sessions with leading human rights scholars and practitioners, providing students with unique opportunities to hear their expert opinions based on research and experience.

This course examines a series of topics on the logic of governance in contemporary China. The main theme is on the role of the party state in China and its bureaucracies in organizing China, focusing on a set of institutions and mechanisms, such as variable coupling between the central and local governments, different modes of governance in the government bureaucracy, collusion among local governments, and campaign-style mobilization. Historical and comparative perspectives and empirical studies are used to illustrate the actual practice of governance in China.

(Graduate students register for 217A.) The transformation of Chinese society from the 1949 revolution to the eve of China's reforms in 1978: creation of a socialist economy, reorganization of rural society and urban workplaces, emergence of new inequalities of power and opportunity, and new forms of social conflict during Mao's Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 and its aftermath.

Why social movements arise, who participates in them, the obstacles they face, the tactics they choose, and how to gauge movement success or failure. Theory and empirical research. Application of concepts and methods to social movements such as civil rights, environmental justice, antiglobalization, and anti-war.

The demographic, economic, political, and cultural roots of social change in the 60s; its legacy in the present U.S.

Why do some people have better ideas than others? Why are some more likely to be bullied in school, get a job, or catch a disease? Why do some innovations, apps, rumors, or revolutions spread like a wildfire, while others never get off the ground? Why are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Spotify so good at recommending people, news, pictures, or songs we might know or like? What do a power outage, the collapse of the Roman Empire, a human stroke, and the Financial Crisis of 2008 have in common? What explains the success of Silicon Valley? And why are there only six (or less) people between us and any other human on this planet? While these questions may seem totally unrelated to each other on first glance, they can all be explored with the help of a single, yet powerful framework: social network analysis. In this class, you will learn to see the world as a web of relations: not only are people, ideas/concepts and things all increasingly connected to each other; the pattern of these relations can tell us a great deal about many phenomena in our social world that defy traditional explanations. At the end of this class, you will not only see networks everywhere; you will have taken a big step toward connecting some of the dots in (y)our world: this is the power of thinking in relations.

In this class we will learn about Israel's unique demographic structure and we will compare it to the US and other countries. Reading materials include general theories as well as research published in scholarly journals. In the first half of this class we will review basic demographic concepts (mortality, fertility and migration), and we will apply them to the Israeli context, with comparisons between different social groups in Israel and with comparison to the US. We will also review basic demographic theories (theories of population change) and apply them to different countries. nnIn the second half of the class we will focus on demography of the family. We will ask how fertility, marriage and divorce differ for different population groups in Israel and the US, and we will tie family processes to current theories of gender and family change. We will also learn how demographic processes may be related to the reproduction of poverty, and inequality.