31 - 40 of 226 results for: SOC

(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.

What does mass incarceration have in common with ICE detention? What role do little-known legal doctrines from the previous century play in making courts inaccessible to survivors of sexual assault and trans people fighting discrimination? In this class we will answer those questions by examining how the seemingly objective nature of the law makes it a potent social tool to promote the interests of the powerful at the expense of the powerless while appearing neutral. This obfuscating power of the law has long been used to reinforce and perpetuate forms of social inequality. In this class we will analyze a few notable examples of such usage of the law and their role as pillars of current social inequality: We will examine how the high burden of proof courts have placed on complainants claiming gender discrimination has blocked most targets of such discrimination from seeking legal remedy; We will examine how redlining and mass incarceration have resulted in the current rates of racial inequality; and how immigration law has resulted in a seemingly objective yet deeply racist system of detention by ICE.

Poverty rates in Israel are high and have been relatively stable in recent decades, with about one fifth of all households (and a third of all children) living below the poverty line. In this class we will learn about poverty and inequality in Israel and we will compare with the US and other countries.nnIn the first few weeks of this class we will review basic theories of poverty and inequality and we will discuss how theories regarding poverty have changed over the years, from the "culture of poverty" to theories of welfare state regimes. We will also learn about various ways of measuring poverty, material hardship, and inequality, and we will review the methods and data used.nnIn the remaining weeks of the class we will turn to substantive topics such as gender, immigration, ethnicity/nationality, welfare policy, age, and health. Within each topic we will survey the debates within contemporary scholarship and we will compare Israel and the US. Examination of these issues will introduce students to some of the challenges that Israeli society faces today.

Families are changing: Non-marital partnerships such as cohabitation are becoming more common, marriage is delayed and fertility is declining. In this class we will learn about how families are changing in Israel and we will compare with the US and other countries. Reading materials include general theories as well as research published in scholarly journals. nnAfter reviewing general theories and major scholarly debates concerning issues of family change, we will turn to specific family processes and compare Israel, the US and other countries. We will ask how family transitions may differ for different population groups and at different stages of the life course, and we will tie family processes to current theories of gender. nnWe will cover a wide range of topics, from marriage and marital dissolution to cohabitation, LAT and remarriage. We will also discuss changes in women's labor force participation and how it bears on fertility, parenthood and household division of labor. Within each substantive topic we will survey the debates within contemporary scholarship and we will compare Israel and the US

How do we balance norms of inclusion and respect with norms of free speech? This seminar course utilizes readings from sociology, political science, and legal/ethical reasoning to elucidate the larger structures and ideals that are at stake in the debates over what kind of speech is tolerable, or more normatively speaking, desirable, at colleges and universities. The expected learning outcomes are: a greater understanding of the free speech's role in American society and democracy, how America's position on free speech compares to other countries, and how speech restriction and liberties can reveal larger patterns in social structure and agency. Finally, key skills students will develop are learning how to identify common ethical frameworks that academic and popular authors use and how to analyze the origins of and changes in social institutions and social structures.

Gender and Technology historicizes the process through which technical skills and modern-day American computing technologies have been imbued with masculinist associations. We explore how social processes link technical expertise to gendered domains, and how ideas about gender are shaped in turn by the resulting technologies. Students explore how American gender roles from the 19th century to the present¿as they intersect with race, class, and sexuality¿are constructed with and through technologies in order to better understand the masculinist defaults of the tech industry in the Silicon Valley.

The central goal of this course is to promote an academic debate and knowledge exchange about social inequalities and poverty in Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazil, analyzing their impact on the scope of politics, the design of social policies and the interests of society. It is based on an analysis of Angus Deaton's work (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2015), that develops an economic-historical study and points out the great economic and social transformations that affect the process of evolution of social and health inequalities. Thus, what is proposed here is an analysis of the mutation of inequalities throughout the history of humanity. Deaton's relevant contribution is his approach to the process of overcoming inequalities and poverty over the last three centuries. His work demonstrates that, although the advances in terms of economic growth and quality of life have been extraordinary, there are inequalities between different regions and countries around the world. From this contextualization, the aim of this course is to discuss a contemporary approach to social development centered on the ideas of Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1998), with a focus on capabilities. Sen's innovative perspective establishes that development should be centered on individuals¿ freedom of choice.

(Graduate students register for 226.) Theory, methods, and research. Concepts such as density, homogeneity, and centrality; applications to substantive areas. The impact of social network structure on individuals and groups in areas such as communities, neighborhoods, families, work life, and innovations.

Data science and machine learning have rapidly gained recognition within the social sciences because they offer powerful new ways to ask questions about social and cultural issues. This course will examine how data science has revolutionized how social scientists study culture by providing new tools to analyze patterns in text data in different contexts and at different scales. More specifically, we will explore how these tools can be used to mine the meaning of text from sources such as posts on social media, transcripts of political debates, books, press releases, and more. This is a hands-on, interactive course culminating in a social data science project designed by the student or a team of up to four students. Most class sessions will be taught interactively using Jupyter Notebooks. Students will follow along with workshop-style lectures by using and modifying the provided Python code in real time to analyze data and visualize results. The course will cover such topics as gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes, workplace discrimination, climate change, and lifestyles. Students will learn to explore text data with techniques such as word embeddings, topic models, and sentiment analysis, to visualize their results, and to scrape the web (where and when appropriate). Students will gain experience with base Python and tools from libraries useful for data science such as Empath, Gensim, NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and spaCy.