41 - 50 of 241 results for: SOC

Mental health is an increasingly hot topic in the media. Why are high school and college students struggling with more and more mental health issues? Why are rates of depression and anxiety increasing? What is the role of social media? How can people cope with the psychological consequences of a multi-year pandemic? These conversations often culminate in the belief that there is a 'mental health crisis' plaguing the 21st century. But mental health, like other social phenomena, is not experienced in a vacuum. How does social context shape individuals' psychological experience? How might sociologists think about the idea of a mental health crisis? This course will provide an introduction to the sociology of mental health and will give you the tools to think critically about narratives around wellbeing that you may hear in your own lives. You will learn how the line between health and illness ('normal' and 'crazy') is socially constructed, how social context influences subjective experience, and how people's responses to subjective experience can change (and have changed) over time. We will also delve into demographic patterns in mental health experiences and discuss the social stigma that surrounds mental illness, mental health treatment, and diagnosis. Throughout the course, we will discuss contemporary issues around mental health - such as social media and the COVID-19 pandemic - using our sociological lens to offer explanations and insights. You will learn through reading scientific articles and books, class discussions, group work, and an independent final project that will be presented to the class at the end of the term.

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.

All societies have had some notion of what makes for a good life. The scientific study of wellbeing, however, is relatively new. As our capacity to collect data about people grows, our understanding of who is well and who is not is also rapidly evolving. Today, we understand wellbeing as having many dimensions, encompassing happiness, purpose, pleasure, health, income, social connection, and inclusion. What determines how individuals fare in these domains of life? How can we improve our collective and individual wellbeing? In this course, we will learn how our ability to pursue wellbeing is shaped by social factors, such as inequality, social networks, culture, government, and markets. We will draw on empirical research and case studies in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics. This course largely focuses on the US, but we will also discuss research from other countries in order to develop an appreciation for the role of social context in shaping wellbeing. Class discussions and assignments will focus on applying insights from academic scholarship to understand current social problems, including the COVID-19 epidemic and its consequences for society.

Recent events have directed attention to the vastly different workplace experiences individuals encounter based on their gender. But just how does gender structure employment outcomes and experiences? This course will examine the ways in which gender comes to be embedded in organizations and conceptions of work and skill, as well as how gender interacts with other identities, like race, class, and sexuality, to create inequality in the workplace. We will discuss the role of discrimination, bias, and harassment as well as occupational segregation and devaluation in producing unequal outcomes among people of diverse genders. By the end of this course, students will be able to think critically about how gender impacts labor market outcomes as well as develop their own ideas for spaces for further research as well as intervention.

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.