Sociology

Identification of the distinctive elements of sociological perspectives on society. Readings confront classical and contemporary approaches with key social issues that include power and authority, culture and communication, poverty and discrimination, social change, and popular uses of sociological concepts.

Please note you must also register for a discussion section to take this course. 

Mandatory discussion section if you are registered for UN1000 The Social World 

Who are you? How did you get there? This course examines the social origins, construction, and transformation of the self through foundational and contemporary sociological theory. We will explore how modernity gave rise to new ideas about the individual self and follow it through contemporary times. We examine how sociologists study the self, and how culture, structure, interaction, and individual experiences shape the self. We pay particular attention to how intersecting identities like race, gender, sexuality, and disability shape individual self-concept and social interaction. Key themes include the development of the self over the life course, the management of stigmatized identities, how individuals craft and evaluate the “authenticity” of identity, and the role of the internet and other technologies in building our identities. Students will gain a comprehensive, intersectional understanding of how identity is built, maintained, and renegotiated in modern society.

AI in Society takes a social science approach to understanding the rise of AI and its uses in various educational, cultural, and work settings. The course will train students in how to critically engage with AI in these settings through a variety of means, including by conducting interviews with workers experiencing AI-driven workplace changes, auditing algorithmic systems for bias, and analyzing AI representations in popular culture. Assessments include a closed-notes midterm exam and a creative final project involving an original audit study. Students with any level of technical experience are encouraged to enroll. 

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. Required for all sociology majors. Prerequisite: at least one sociology course of the instructor's permission. Theoretical accounts of the rise and transformations of modern society in the19th and 20th centuries. Theories studied include those of Adam Smith, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Max Weber, Roberto Michels. Selected topics: individual, society, and polity; economy, class, and status: organization and ideology; religion and society; moral and instrumental action.

Discussion section for Social Theory (SOCI UN3000).

Discussion section for Social Theory (SOCI UN3000).

Discussion section for Social Theory (SOCI UN3000).

Discussion section for Social Theory (SOCI UN3000).

Prerequisites: SOCI UN1000 The Social World or Instructor Permission Required for all Sociology majors. Introductory course in social scientific research methods. Provides a general overview of the ways sociologists collect information about social phenomena, focusing on how to collect data that are reliable and applicable to our research questions.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

Prerequisites: Meets senior requirement. Instructor permission required. The instructor will supervise the writing of long papers involving some form of sociological research and analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the underlying health disparities that exist in the United States more apparent. The traditional biomedical model places the responsibility of these disparities on the choices that an individual makes. The model assumes that one’s smoking, eating and exercising habits are based on personal choice. Therefore, the prevalence of morbidities such as high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes is the result of an individual’s poor decisions. This course will explore how the conditions under which individuals live, work, play and pray impact their health outcomes. Collectively these conditions are referred to as the Social Drivers of Health (SDoH) and often they reveal the systemic inequalities that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. This course will also call upon the need for a paradigm shift from the "Social" "Determinants" of Health to the “Structural” "Drivers" of Health. This shift is in recognition that it is the underlying structures (laws, material infrastructure) that impact  and drive health outcomes. The development of the SDoH has challenged health care providers to look beyond the biomedical model that stresses an individual’s behavior as the main predictor of adverse health conditions. Instead the SDoH focuses on an “upstream” approach that examines the underlying systemic and racial inequalities that impact communities of color and their health outcomes. 

Transnationalism, Citizenship, and Belonging covers the myriad ways that transnationalism is experienced in both South to North and South to South migrations. Transnationalism and its contenders, globalization and nationalism, will be placed within a broader discussion of belonging based on sociological theories of citizenship, politics of exclusion, and boundary-making. 

Drawing on sociological theory and disability studies scholarship, this course explores how societies construct meanings of disability, normalcy, and difference, and how these constructions influence social institutions, policies, and everyday interactions. Through critical analysis of key institutions—e.g. education, work, and the criminal justice system—students will examine how ableism operates at structural levels while also exploring disability rights movements and forms of resistance and agency. Many of these issues will be examined through an intersectional lens, analyzing how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and other identities to create complex experiences of privilege and marginalization. 

This class brings the sociology of work into conversation with representations of servitude and service work in novels and television. The founding theorists of sociology were trying to make sense of the development of capitalism and the industrial revolution, and placed work at the center of their analyses. As our industrial economy transformed into one dominated by service work, scholars shifted their attention to new forms of work and developed new frameworks for theorizing interactions and relationships in the service sector workplace. How do we understand a workplace where interactions with customers, clients, or patients is a significant part of the work? How do we understand circumstances where we pay others to care for – and even to love – the old, the sick, and the young? What happens when one person’s workplace is another person’s home? And what does precarity look like, and feel like, in the service economy? These are some of the issues we will be examining this semester.

Fictionalized representations of workers and workplaces help illustrate the sociological points we are learning, and are especially good at exploring the interactions and relationships central to service work. They can also bring us closer to the emotional experience of work. In Part I of the course, we will get our sociological grounding in the study of interactive service work. In Part II, we will examine different forms of work and pair sociology with novels and TV shows.

In this class we will examine the politics, organization, and experience of work. In the first three weeks we will get our bearings and consider some basic (but difficult!) questions about work, including: What counts as work and who counts as a worker? How important are our jobs to our survival in the world, and what makes for a good or bad job? In this section you will start thinking about and analyzing your own work experiences. In weeks four and five we will read what sociology’s founders had to say about work, and consider some of the important shifts to work that accompanied industrialization. Then we will turn to 20th century transformations, including the rise of the service economy and worker-customer relations, changes in forms of managerial control and worker responses to these changes, globalization, and the proliferation of precarious work. Finally, we will turn to examining gender, class and race in labor markets and on the job, paid and unpaid reproductive labor, the construction of selves at work, and the job of fashion modeling. Throughout the course we will examine how the sociology of work is bound up with other key institutions including gender, race, class, and the family.

This course examines diversity at the societal, organizational, and individual levels.  At the societal level, for example: How to measure the health of an economy? Growth in GDP is the current dominant metric. But organizational diversity might be a better measure if health is understood as the ability to adapt to sudden changes in the environment.  What is the relationship between wealth and diverse principles of worth?  At the organizational level: Under what conditions does racial and gender diversity contribute to higher team performance?  Can a complex organization be managed according to diverse principles of evaluation?  Moving to the individual level, how do we manage the multiple presentations of self in a diverse society? 

Examines processes of immigrant incorporation in the U.S. and other advanced democracies, with a focus on how immigration intersects with categorical inequalities (such as citizenship, social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and religion) in major institutional realms. Under instructor's supervision, students conduct a substantial research project related to course themes.

This seminar will investigate efforts to coordinate, justify, and understand global activism through lenses of internationalism, solidarity, and universal human rights. We will also study transformations in the global institutional landscape – comprising international finance, supranational unions, and non-governmental organizations – which is itself the contradictory outcome of prior cycles of contestation. We will survey historical precedents, analyze contemporary manifestations, and speculate on the future prospects of global activism. Students will explore cases and concepts by reading scholarly literature and by considering the political practices, texts, and media created by movements themselves.

The American Dream of owning a home has long represented an ideal of American equity. The ideal screams of opportunity and meritocracy: no matter how poor one begins life, as long as they work and save, they can enjoy the security and safety of home. To many, this ideal gives them hope, for they can see possibility for their achievement. To others, the ideal feels like a farce, for they rightly anticipate facing countless barriers to achieving that dream.

This course examines challenges, contradictions, and ironies of American housing equity. We study ways in which the ideal of single-family home ownership has directly led to excluding large portions of the population from secure housing. We examine why and how many Americans can be deeply committed to equality and freedom and still perpetuate inequalities in their housing choices. We examine how people at the bottom who understand well the barriers they face still manage to survive, invent, and struggle to achieve dignity and equity in their housing.

The course examines core issues of housing equity in America historically and in the present. The course primarily offers a sociological perspective on housing. But we will also read work and bring in perspectives from geography, history, urban planners, and others. In addition, we will also engage with work by journalists, which represents one way that the multi-disciplinary issues of housing are connected in narratives intended for a wider audience than more scholarly products. While we draw on work from various perspectives, we will focus on developing a sociological lens to understand housing.

This seminar explores theories regarding race/racism, gendered racism, capitalism, political economy, and processes related to how governments and markets allocate capital to build and maintain public goods and services and private amenities—from drinking water, to homes, to schools, to grocery and retail stores. Focus is on debates within and across Black communities regarding how Black people should seek individual and collective capacity to realize their citizenship rights and privileges, with particular attention to variation in Black Americans’ interests across the class spectrum. The final two weeks are devoted to Black liberation and reparations movements.

What is global health? Where do global health disease priorities come from, and how do the ways that we understand disease shape how we respond to it? What happens when good ideas and good intentions go wrong? This course critically examines the politics of global health and its impact on local institutions and people. Drawing on social science research, the course will address three main themes: 1) how global health priorities are defined and constructed, 2) how our understandings of disease influence our response to that disease, and 3) how efforts to respond to disease intersect with people on the ground, sometimes in unexpected ways. We will examine the global health industry from the vantage point of different institutions and actors – international organizations, governments, local healthcare institutions, healthcare workers, and people living with or at risk of various illnesses like HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer, and Ebola. A primary goal of this course is to help you to develop skills in critical thinking in relation to global health issues and their impact on society. Students will demonstrate their knowledge through individual writing, class discussion, presentations, and a final research project.

This seminar examines transgender people’s lives through a sociological lens, investigating how social structures, institutions, and everyday interactions shape trans people’s lives and identities. Students will analyze the intersectional nature of transgender experience, exploring how gender, race, class, disability, nation, and citizenship status create diverse lived realities within transgender communities. Topics include family dynamics, violence, resistance, space, work, legal recognition, and visions of transgender futures.

Over the past few decades, scholars have raised concerns about greed and the development of a “medical-industrial complex.” There are increased costs of medications, greater role of private firms, and adoption of corporate structures within health facilities. Today, we are witnessing a deeper entrenchment of market logics. Financialization – the dominance of financial logics, institutions, and actors – has entered the health sector. This change includes a shift in control from actors in healthcare to those in finance as well as a resulting shift in organizational logics such as emphasizing short-term profit maximization or shareholder conceptions of control. This course will examine how financialization in healthcare operates as well as its implications for healthcare practices and experiences in the US and globally. 

From the Dutch settlers of the 17th century to immigrant mayors, and "transplants," New York has always been an immigrant destination and center of innovation, contestation, and claim-making amongst different groups. New York was written about and described as the Melting Pot in the early 20th century by Israel Zangwill. While this was a hopeful envisioning of New York and the United States more generally, the backdrop was one of immigrant and ethnic conflict, a thriving Americanization movement, and a population vying to learn to become American, create a livelihood, and secure a place for future generations. Immigrant New York explores these struggles and the contributions made by immigrants, past and present. Alongside text and theory, the course will be organized around research projects that take students off campus and into the 5 boroughs of New York City.

This seminar examines social stratification through the lens of Asian American experiences. Social stratification refers to the unequal distribution of valued resources, such as income, wealth, education, and power, and the processes by which these resources are allocated across individuals, groups, and generations.

We will explore how the broader patterns of inequality and mobility in the United States intersect with the histories and social positions of Asian Americans. Topics include income and wealth inequality, educational attainment and occupational mobility, immigration and inter-generational mobility, racialization and stereotypes (e.g., the “model minority" and “perpetual foreigner" narratives), gender and family dynamics, neighborhood segregation, and political and civic incorporation. We will also consider how globalization, transnational migration, and the future of work shape opportunities and constraints for different Asian American communities.

This seminar is a continuation of the course from last semester (SOCI3988). It will culminate in you completing your thesis. Whereas last semester you concentrated on posing interesting, important, and feasible research questions, as well as how to conduct data collection, this semester you will learn how: to troubleshoot challenges and ethical issues in collecting data (i.e. data collection), translate your data into findings and conclusions (i.e. data analysis), orient your findings in an existing conversation (i.e. revising a literature review and introduction/hook), and write to persuade your audience and readers of your argument (i.e. write persuasively). 

Instructor permission is required to join the course. Please note this course is the second part in a two part sequence, you must first take SOCI 3988 before you can enroll in SOCI 3989. 

Money is clearly one of the most powerful social linkages between individuals, groups and nation states that exists. Its power of abstraction generates equivalences where none existed, forms the basis of most calculations and has the metaphysical quality of generating off-spring (interest). Yet, sociological inquiry into its emergence, institutional underpinnings and importance for the development of societies is fragmented. This course will draw on sociological sources and complement it with work in economic anthropology and heterodox economics to inquire how money has changed human societies. It argues that a proper historical and conceptual understanding of money and its relationship to markets and states allows us to overcome the state-market dichotomy, to understand the deep transformation the evolution towards capitalism entailed and how deeply entrenched certain representations related to capitalist economies are embedded in our societies.

Illiberal and authoritarian politicians are especially prone to demographic anxieties. Given their strong grip on power, they tend to turn these anxieties into wide ranging policies encouraging or discouraging births and targeting particular groups of the population for reproduction.  In this course we will first explore the concept of populations and social reproduction, then take a good look at historical connections between politics, racism, sexism and pro -and anti-natalism globally.  Next, we will focus on the causes, manifestations and impact of pronatalist policies introduced (primarily but not exclusively) by authoritarian-leaning political parties around the world. We will explore the rhetoric connected to the encouragement of birth and highlight its ethnocentric, nationalist orientations. We will compare the variety of policy solutions devised by illiberal leaders, ranging from restrictions in reproductive rights, through the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies, to financial incentives encouraging births, and beyond. We will then explore if, and if so how, these new policies reshape the principles of gendered social citizenship. We will explore the impact of these pronatalist policies but focus not on birth and fertility rates but rather on their impact on social justice, such as, for example, on the poverty chances of different segments of the population, on the increase in patriarchal power in the household, or the motherhood penalty and the definition of women’s work.

The goal of the course is to introduce students to foundational texts, theories, and research in the field of sociology of education. In particular, we will focus on the role of schooling in social stratification and social reproduction in the United States.

This course is organized by broad topic and theme. We will begin with a discussion of the purpose of schooling before moving into a discussion of some theoretical perspectives on the role of schooling in our society. Next, we will discuss inequality in schooling across multiple socio-demographic categories, including social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion (in addition to inequality at the intersection of multiple social categories). By the end of this course, you should have a strong foundation in research on education’s role in society.

It took the mass murder of six Asian women in Atlanta on March 16, 2021 to draw national attention to what Asian Americans have been warning about since the wake of Covid-19: a surge in anti-Asian violence and hate. Since the onset of the coronavirus, 1 in 8 Asian American adults experienced a hate incident, and 1 in 7 Asian American women worry all the time about being victimized, reflecting an under-recognized legacy of anti-Asian violence, bigotry, misogyny, and discrimination in the United States that dates back more than 150 years. Drawing on research and readings from the social sciences, this course links the past to the present in order to understand this legacy, and how it continues to affect Asian Americans today.

The course is designed to introduce PhD students in Sociology to basic techniques for collecting, interpreting, analyzing, reporting, and theorizing from interview and observational data. Through instructional and exemplary readings and practical exercises, students will learn the theory and practice behind inductive and abductive field-based analysis, with an aim toward developing or refining an ongoing research project.

This course introduces students to the literature on globalization and the diffusion of culture and institutions. It covers literatures in sociology and political science as well as some anthropology and history. This course will not discuss economic, financial, or migratory globalization in depth. In the first part, we will survey the major theories of the global diffusion of culture and institutions: world polity theory, global field theory, the policy diffusion literature, etc. In the second part, we discuss select topics, such as the role of local power relations in diffusion processes or the consequences of diffusion for patterns of cultural similarity and difference across the world.