41 - 50 of 238 results for: SOC

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.

What does is mean for something to be 'natural', and why is a connection to nature so often seen as a good thing? Drawing on perspectives from sociology, psychology, anthropology, environmental studies, and popular culture, this course analyzes how the concepts of nature and naturalness contribute to the way we make sense of our social world, including based on race, gender, beauty, morality, and politics. Students will learn about the history of environmentalism, the sociology of bodies, the economics of consumption, and the social psychology of traditionalism. Through a combination of lectures, in-class discussions, written assignments, and group projects, students will be encouraged to interrogate their own relationships with nature in order to more intentionally act towards the natural world and towards other people. Throughout, the course will prioritize a sociological lens by considering the roles of social relationships, power, scientific evidence, and inequality in cultural conceptions of nature.

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 the relationship between lifestyle and political identity. Students will learn to explore text data with tools such as word embeddings, topic models, and sentiment analysis. Students will gain experience with base Python as well as tools from libraries useful for data science such as Empath, Gensim, NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and spaCy.

There are few issues more important for human life than those concerned with sustainability. Current global trends, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and increasing urbanization, raise critical questions about future environmental and social sustainability. Changes are necessary for the survival of our species. But how can we bring them about? In this course we explore the historical and cultural diversity of human-environment interaction, and analyze sustainability in a variety of contexts: from the local to the global, in the past and present, in the U.S. and among small-scale societies. We¿ll look at development through the lens of food and agriculture, and discuss sustainability in the context of globalization¿ whether social movements around food justice, or the new world of lab-based meats. From behavioral psychology, and how it contributes to environmental action, to the individual choices we make every day, this course will help you reflect on the world, and how to act in it.

(Graduate students register for EDUC 212 or SOC 229X). Combination of social science and historical perspectives trace the major developments, contexts, tensions, challenges, and policy issues of urban education.

The effects of schools and schooling on individuals, the stratification system, and society. Education as socializing individuals and as legitimizing social institutions. The social and individual factors affecting the expansion of schooling, individual educational attainment, and the organizational structure of schooling.

This course takes a problem-solving focus. Our main goal is to learn to design research-based interventions to improve diversity, equity and inclusion outcomes in organizations. U.S. society has become increasingly more diverse, and yet our organizations do not reflect that diversity. Further, even successful efforts to improve diversity are often not accompanied by a plan to create truly inclusive organizations that support a diverse workforce or student body. We will begin by comparing explanations for the lack of diversity and inclusion in modern organizations. We will then examine research that illustrates the cost to individuals and organizations for failing to leverage the diverse talent in our society. Guest speakers will share their challenges and successes in increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the organizations where they work. Then, it will be your turn. Working in teams you will design your own research-based intervention to promote DEI at the organizational, team, and individual level and present your intervention to the class. Along the way, you will also learn effective strategies for navigating non-inclusive organizations and for being an effective change agent in your own environment.