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.

To many observers, mass incarceration is among the most pressing civil rights and human rights issues in

the contemporary United States. America’s carceral state is sweeping. In addition to the nearly 2 million

people currently incarcerated, there are over 7 million people living who have been imprisoned in the past

three decades and 19 million people currently living with felony records. These carceral sentences impact

the lived conditions and life chances of those most directly affected as well as their families and

communities. These dynamics are also deeply racialized and have reshaped American culture and

democracy at the local and national levels. But that is not the full story. Liberatory movements have

resisted and surged against racialized subjugation for centuries in the United States, making confinement

a continually contested racial and political condition in the United States.

In this course, students will study the origins and developments of mass incarceration, as well as the

political struggles that have been waged against it. Students will read across a range of genres, including

scholarly work in the fields of sociology, political science, history, and law, as well as performance,

memoir, and testimony. By examining the rise of the carceral state in this way, students will gain a critical

lens on longstanding concerns in the American imaginary: race and racism, justice and injustice,

community and reparation, liberation and abolition. While the course is not exhaustive, it is meant to

equip students with a working framework on the critical debates in the field.

Discussion section for Social Theory (SOCI UN3000).

Discussion section for Social Theory (SOCI UN3000).

Prerequisites: SOCI UN1000

Discussion section for SOCI UN3010: METHODS FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Prerequisites: SOCI UN1000

Discussion section for SOCI UN3010: METHODS FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

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.

Discussion section for SOCI BC3248: Race, Ethnicity, and Education in the US

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 Determinants 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” Determinants of Health. This shift is in recognition that it is the underlying structures (laws, material infrastructure) that impact 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. An analysis that focuses upstream reveals that government policies and social structure are at the core of health disparities. Through the lens of New York City and its health systems, this course will cover a wide range of topics related to race and health, including: racial inequalities in housing and homelessness, biases in medical institutions, and the unconscious bias that lead providers to have racialized perception of an individual’s pain tolerance. In addition to exposing these inequalities the course will also provide innovative solutions that seek to mitigate these barriers including: home visiting programs, medical respite programs for homeless patients and food as medicine in health care systems. Students will demonstrate their knowledge through individual writing, and class discussion. The course revolves around important readings, lectures, and podcasts that illustrates how one’s class position and the color of one’s skin can influence the access to healthcare one has as well as their experience of it.

Emphasizes foundations and development of black communities post-1940, and mechanisms in society that create and maintain racial inequality. Explores notions of identity and culture through lenses of gender, class and sexual orientation, and ideologies that form the foundation of black politics. Primarily lecture with some discussion.

Examines how people use law, how law affects people, and how law develops, using social scientific research. Covers law in everyday life; legal and social change; legal subjects such as citizens and corporations, and the legitimacy of law. Recommended for pre-law and social-science majors. No prerequisites or previous knowledge required.

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. 

Examines the ways sociologists have studied the field of medicine and experiences of health and illness. We cannot understand topics of health and illness by only looking at biological phenomena; we must consider a variety of social, political, economic, and cultural forces. Uses sociological perspectives and methods to understand topics such as: unequal patterns in health and illness; how people make sense of and manage illness; the ways doctors and patients interact with each other; changes in the medical profession, health policies and institutions; social movements around health; and how some behaviors but not others become understood as medical problems. Course is geared towards pre-med students as well as those with general interests in medicine, health and society.

This course explores the sociology and history of race and racism, ethnicity and ethnocentrism, and unequal access to education in the United States through readings, films, audio, and multimedia. Experiences of students in public and private K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and alternative and informal educational settings will be considered. Movements by students and communities to fight discrimination and injustice, demand equal opportunities and resources, and to realize the promise of education as a means of achieving personal and collective liberation will also be examined. Case studies may include: boarding schools for Indigenous children; Reconstruction-era public schools; the settlement house movement; Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement; the Black Panther Party’s educational initiatives; community-controlled schools; Black, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Ethnic Studies programs; urban educational reform, public school closures, and charter schools; the school-to-prison pipeline; standardized testing and advanced placement courses; and more. 

This class will examine the social phenomenon of exclusion. Attempts to understand the social behavior of creating insiders and outsiders is a hallmark in Sociology. How does it happen? What purpose does it serve? Who decides who is in and who is out? While some forms of social closure, like segregation, are more well known, there are numerous mechanisms of social exclusion people and groups employ in the social world. Additionally, forms of exclusion do not always come from the top down as a form of domination, but sometimes from the bottom up, with the goal of resource redistribution. We will study these different forms of exclusion along with the theorized aims these forms of closure seek to achieve to get a more comprehensive picture of how social exclusion is used in the social world.

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.

Prerequisites: SOCI BC1003 or equivalent social science course and permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15 students. Drawing examples from popular music, religion, politics, race, and gender, explores the interpretation, production, and reception of cultural texts and meanings. Topics include aesthetic distinction and taste communities, ideology, power, and resistance; the structure and functions of subcultures; popular culture and high culture; and ethnography and interpretation.

The course will focus on a single topic within US law-and-society scholarship: either the profession of lawyering or the criminalization of immigration. We will critically examine existing research, and then create our own. With the support of their peers and instructor, students will design and complete substantial independent research projects. Limited to sociology majors with senior standing (except in exceptional circumstances), and having taken SOCI UN3217 Law and Society is strongly preferred. Fulfills the Research Paper Option for the senior requirement in sociology at Barnard.

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 explores how broad trends that shape contemporary Latin American societies intertwine with the specificities of people’s multilayered local realities. Through ethnographic narratives of the everyday lives of Latin Americans, we will learn how life histories and narrative accounts offer windows for understanding inequality and persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of an unequal world. Themes covered include precarious work, migration and displacement, housing, racism and state violence, gender and family, health, environmental devastation, and social movements. Cases are drawn from across the Americas, including: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Nicaragua. 

This course explores the interdisciplinary challenges of establishing a human society on Mars. Students explore a number of challenges that are involved in reaching the Red Planet and setting up a functional social habitat for the long term. This includes both the numerous logistical hurdles of traveling to and surviving on Mars, as well as the social, political, and ethical considerations of establishing a new society on the planet. Through analysis and discussion of scientific research, social science texts, and popular media, students will gain a deep understanding of the physiological, psychological, and strategic challenges of long-duration space travel and human habitation on another planet.

The course is not scientific or overly technical in nature. Instead, the perspective being adopted is that of a social scientist seeking to understand how humans can travel to another planet and live together. The first half of the course focuses on the practical, physiological, and psychological challenges of traveling to and surviving on Mars while maintaining contact withEarth. In the first part of the course, students will study the unique environmental conditions of Mars, the health risks of space travel, and how to maintain communication and connectivity with Earth despite vast distances. Students will also engage with how sustainable living on Mars—through food, energy, and resource management—could shape the future of human expansion in space.

The second half delves into the complexities of building social, legal, and economic systems in a new extraterrestrial society. Students will critically evaluate how to create a self-sustaining, functional civilization on Mars. Given the social science focus of the class, there will be emphasis placed on topics such as governance, establishing social contracts and property rights, and building economic systems for an entirely new world.

This course is meant to attract a small group of 10-15 students interested in space exploration. The small size and intensive four-hour class format is intended to foster creative problem-solving and interdisciplinary thinking (see below for discussion of non-traditional format). By the end of the course, students will not only understand the practicalities of space colonization but also develop skills in envisioning and designing innovative solutions for humanity’s future beyond Earth.

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.

This class will examine the development of education for African Americans in the United States. Chattel slavery and its afterlives are marked by questions, debates, and experiments not simply in schooling for Black people, but how to use education for the practice of freedom. Through examining this development, students will learn how the experience of Black people in schools complicates static notions about public vs private schools, demands for school desegregation, and the ongoing role of (mostly) white philanthropy in shaping the development of education for Black youth in the US and around the world. 

The Gender/Sexuality Workshop is a forum for Ph.D. students interested in social science topics broadly related to gender and sexuality. In particular, it will provide an opportunity for students share and refine their own works in progress by getting feedback from other students in the workshop. The workshop is geared towards students conducting empirical work, from ethnographies and interview-based projects to archival research to other kinds of critical quantitative work that attempts to theorize gender/sexuality. We will take an expansive view of gender and sexuality as a mode of classifying people and a structure that organizes social life, including work that uses gender/sexuality as a lens to interrogate other social structures such as empire, capitalism, science and knowledge, states and governance, and more. The G/S Workshop will meet biweekly (every other week) over the course of Spring 2025.

The Carcerality, Law, and Punishment Workshop is a forum for students interested in social science research on the carceral system broadly construed and related institutions, processes, and practices. The CLP workshop invites leading scholars and brings together students and faculty for a deeper and more focused dialogue about new directions in the field. Supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy (ISERP), the CLP Workshop will meet generally on two Tuesdays every month during the academic year, and provide students with an opportunity to read, discuss, and share works-in-progress as well as build a scholarly network with others at Columbia and beyond. This year, the workshop theme will be “Politics, Movements, and Public Engagement.”

The seminar will examine the main political, economic, and social processes that have been shaping contemporary Israel. The underlying assumption in this seminar is that much of these processes have been shaped by the 100-year Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict. The first part of the course will accordingly focus on the historical background informing the conflict and leading to the Palestinian refugee problem and establishment of a Jewish, but not Palestinian, state in 1948.  The second part of the seminar focuses on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank (and Gaza) and the settlement project, as well as on USA's role and its impact on the conflict, the occupation, and Israel. These topics did not get much academic attention until recently, but as researchers began to realize that the Occupation and the West Bank settlements are among the most permanent institutions in Israel, they have come under the scrutiny of academic research. 

The third part the seminar will concentrate on the development of the conflict after the establishment of Israel and its effects on sociological processes and institutions in contemporary Israel.  Analyzing patterns of continuity and change in the past seven decades, we will discuss immigration and emigration patterns, as well as issue relating to ethnicity, gender, religion and politics, and the Israeli military.

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.

Escaping artificial intelligence has become a complicated task. Escaping the discourse about AI has become even more so. Whether we see in it a promise of progress, the vector of a dangerous regression, a fad that will eventually pass, a simple tool, discussions about AI are omnipresent. And when we ignore it, AI often affects our lives in ways we do not notice. Because AI has become integral to the discourses and the practices of contemporary societies, social scientists are being pressed to position themselves with respect to it. 

The idea behind this course is that to understand what is at stake with AI, we first need to understand what AI is. It is useful to explore its origins, its history, the movements that have gone through it. It is also necessary to understand in concrete terms what a contemporary AI algorithm does. This means that we need to grasp, even intuitively, the difference between an expert system and a connectionist approach; why the Transformers architecture has allowed progress in the study of content; why neural networks are said to be “better at prediction than explanation”. Understanding what certain now-ubiquitous terms mean (such as RLHF, train/test/dev sets, AGI, zero and few-shot learning, ...) is also important for those who want to study contemporary societies. 

Prerequisites: the director of graduate studies permission if taking more than 3 points of study with any one faculty member. Individual writing on a topic agreed upon by the supervising faculty member.

Prerequisites: the director of graduate studies permission if taking more than 3 points of study with any one faculty member. Individual writing on a topic agreed upon by the supervising faculty member.

The Sociology Frontiers Graduate Student Workshop is intended for Sociology graduate students and will run in conjunction with the newly instituted Sociological Frontiers Colloquium.It will provide an opportunity for students to read and discuss the works presented in theFrontiers Colloquium, which will meet 7 times over the course of the 2024-2025 academic year (3 times in the Fall and 4 times in the Spring) while also sharing and refining their own works in progress. The Frontiers Workshop will meet on the same day as the Frontiers Colloquium.Students who enroll in the Frontiers Workshop are expected to attend both the colloquium and the workshop.The first half of the student workshop consists of attending theFrontiers Colloquium.The Frontiers Colloquiumis sponsored by Columbia University’s Sociology Department and will bring leading sociologists who are doing cutting-edge research to speak to faculty and students in the department.The speaker list for this year will be announced in August 2024