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The state of California, the so-called 'land of plenty,' in fact has the country's highest poverty rate as well as extremely high rates of homelessness and profound racial and ethnic disparities. These problems persist despite a long history of anti-inequality policy. What should be done? In an innovative $35M experiment, the state of California is testing bold new approaches to taking on poverty and inequality, including an unconditional 'guaranteed income' that assures that everyone can raise their children in healthy environments, invest in their skills, and take advantage of opportunities. The Stanford Guaranteed Income Team - a coalition of Stanford faculty - will be advising on the implementation and evaluation of this experiment (pending the state's final review of their grant application). Would you like to assist with one of the boldest anti-inequality experiments of our time? If you sign on for this course, you will (a) learn about the causes of poverty and other inequities and how they can be taken on, and (b) then assist with the implementation and evaluation of the experiment by interviewing potential participants. This course is not for the faint of heart. It will involve intensive training in qualitative interviewing and other types of research; it will require a commitment to be there for the people who have decided to participate in the experiment; and it will require a willingness to listen and learn with humility and respect.

Data science has rapidly gained recognition within the social sciences because it offers powerful new ways to ask questions about social systems and problems. This course will examine how tools from data science can be used to analyze pressing issues relating to disaster, inequality, and scarcity in the Anthropocene (the current period in which humans are the primary driver of planetary changes). We will explore how a range of computational methods can be used to garner new meanings from sources such as weather monitors, press releases, websites, government programs, 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 R/Python code in real time to analyze data and visualize results. The course will cover such topics as the South African water crisis, Hurricane Katrina, the California Wildfires, and water rights along the Colorado River. Students will learn to explore text data with tools such as word embeddings, topic models, and sentiment analysis. Students will gain experience with Python and R and will learn about a range of packages for cleaning data, linking and matching records, and mapping their results.

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, especially around how and what we eat. But how can we bring about the changes needed? In this course, we explore the historical and cultural diversity of human-environment interaction as it pertains to food and agriculture, 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 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, your own behaviors and assumptions, and how to act in greater accordance with the Earth's limits.

Dreamed up in the heat of the Cold War, game theory has encouraged generations of strategists in politics, law, the military, and academia to see conflicts as games with rules, players, choices, and payoffs. But game-theoretical situations hardly resemble the games people play in their everyday lives. During this course we study and develop social theory based on how people play games outside of behavior labs and thought experiments. What causes people to join games and how do games keep players engaged? Topics begin with traditional game theory and then expand focus to studies of competitions in settings as disparate as chess, mushroom hunting, schools, and markets.

We are used to thinking about diseases and illnesses as biological problems that need medical solutions. For example, suppose that a loved one has been diagnosed with cancer. Their cancer has an immediate, biological cause (genetic mutation) that we point to, and their doctor has an immediate, medical treatment (chemotherapy) that we can employ. This is how we think about health and practice medicine: focusing on the immediate causes and symptoms for one individual. Sociologists, however, view these situations differently, instead considering the social contexts of these diseases and thinking about the health of populations rather than of individuals. For example, perhaps they grew up in a town whose drinking water was poisoned by a local chemical factory, and this greatly increased their risk of getting cancer. How did circumstances throughout their life - many outside their control - like their socioeconomic status, government policies and local politics, and their access to medical care affect their eventually getting cancer? In this course, we will introduce key concepts from the sociology of health and illness - including fundamental causes of disease, health disparities, social determinants of health, social stress, social capital, the social construction of illness, medicalization, health care delivery, the structure of health care systems, and public policy - to examine the social causes and contexts of disease and illness. How do social conditions affect our health? What even are "diseases" or "illnesses"? Who gets sick, and who stays sick? What is medicine and health care, and how do we decide who gets them? We will apply these theoretical concepts and frameworks to these questions to understand how health and illness are not only biological processes occurring within individuals but also social processes between people, groups, and institutions.

Despite gains in recent years, women remain dramatically underrepresented in virtually all realms of the American political system. In this course, students will become familiar with the empirical patterns and trends, social and cultural debates, and policy issues concerning the role of gender in American politics. We will examine the gender gap in voting patterns and mass political participation, as well as strategies for increasing women¿s representation. Students will come to understand the effects of women¿s lack of parity, including policy attitudes, processes, and outcomes. Furthermore, we will explore gender inequality in politics through an intersectional lens of race, class, age, education, and sexuality.

Prior arrangement required.