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. 

An examination of the diverse values, meanings and identities that comprise American pluralism, the moral and political clashes and communities that emerge from them, and the sociological concepts that make sense of them. Part One explores larger macro-themes (American exceptionalism; individualism and community; religion and secularism; pleasure and restraint in post-Puritan America; race, immigration and identity). Part Two explores the interplay between these large themes and cultural polarization in post-Trump America, with special focus on the cultural forces at play in the 2024 presidential election: red states, blues states and cultural sorting;  changing conceptions of liberalism and conservatism; class divisions and the global rise of cultural populism;  the concept of “epistemic tribes” and media silos; fights over religion and race, sexuality and family; the current war on “wokeness” and the debate on free expression.  

Gender and sexuality are fundamental to how we understand ourselves as individuals – but have you thought about them as kinds of social inequality, similar to race, class, or disability? In this course, students will learn about gender and sexuality as elements of social context which are fundamental to our social worlds, as aspects of social organization, as key forms of inequality (heterosexuality/homosexuality, cis/trans or nonbinary, men/women), and as forces that shape health. Developing skills to analyze how gender and sexuality shape health includes mastering some key concepts at the intersection of social science, gender and sexuality studies, and health sciences as well as learning some content about social aspects of a range of health problems.

This course, which has no prerequisites, may be of particular interest to students majoring in sociology, anthropology, or gender and sexuality studies, as well as to students interested in health science careers (note, our engagement with questions about inequality and social structure speak to topics on the MCAT).  A key element of course design is that all graded writing is done *during* class time (of course with appropriate disability accommodations), both with the goal of structuring AI-free writing and helping students manage their workload.

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.

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. 

Power, Politics, and Society introduces students to the field of political sociology, a subfield within sociology that is deeply engaged in the study of power in formal and diffuse forms. Using sociological theories and current events from the US and around the world, this course is designed to help students analyze their social worlds, and understand the significance of the old adage, “everything is political.” 

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.

Examines the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States from colonial period to present. Analyzes how capitalist interests, class differences, gender, immigration, and who “deserves” the full rights and privileges of citizenship, shape boundaries between and within racial and ethnic groups. Also considers how racism affects resource access inequities between racial groups in education, criminal justice, media, and other domains. Explores factors underpinning major social change with an eye toward discerning social conditions necessary to create and sustain just social systems.

Prerequisites: One introductory course in Sociology suggested. Social movements and the theories social scientists use to explain them, with emphasis on contemporary American activism. Cases include the Southern civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, contemporary feminist mobilizations, LGBTQ activism, immigrant rights and more recent forms of grassroots politics. 

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. 

Prerequisites: One introductory course in Sociology suggested. Examination of factors in gender identity that are both universal (across time, culture, setting) and specific to a social context. Social construction of gender roles in different settings, including family, work, and politics. Attention to the role of social policies in reinforcing norms or facilitating change.

This is an undergraduate seminar in social inequality and mobility. Social inequality is broadly defined as the unequal distribution of scarce resources and of the processes by which these resources are allocated to individuals, groups, and populations. The study of inequality en-compasses income and wealth inequality, socioeconomic hierarchies and privileges, poverty and unemployment, social mobility over the life course and across generations, inequality in the educational system, race-ethnic and gender inequality, globalization and the future of work, beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of inequality and opportunity, neighborhood segregation, and the consequences of inequality and policy interventions. Over this semester, we will investigate such questions as: How likely are individuals to end up in the same social stratum as their par-ents? Will globalization and automation exacerbate or reduce inequality in workplace? Is there growing inequality in the U.S. and around the globe and, if so, why? In this class, we cover the concepts, theories, facts, and methods of analysis used by sociologists to understand social inequality and mobility. This course takes most of its examples from the contemporary U.S., but we will place U.S. in historical and comparative perspectives as well.

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.

Examines how changes in the economy, racial composition, and class relations affect community life-how it is created, changed and sometimes lost-with a specific focus on the local urban context. Student research projects will address how contemporary forces such as neoliberalization, gentrification and tourism impact a communitys social fabric.

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.

One of the glaring forms of inequalities that persists today is the race-based gap in access to health care, quality of care, and health outcomes. This course examines how institutionalized racism and the structure of health care contributes to the neglect and sometimes abuse of racial and ethnic minorities. Quite literally, how does race affect one’s life chances? This course covers a wide range of topics related to race and health, including: racial inequalities in health outcomes, biases in medical institutions, immigration status and health, racial profiling in medicine, and race in the genomic era.

Asian Americans and the Law invites students to examine how U.S. law has shaped the experiences of Asian Americans for nearly 150 years by pairing landmark legal cases with evidence‑based social science research. The course traces a sweeping arc from Chinese Exclusion Acts and Japanese American incarceration to contemporary debates over immigration, affirmative action, and workplace discrimination. By the end of the course, students will gain a broader understanding for the ways in which law operates as a force that structures social life, opportunities, constraints, belonging, and exclusion.

This course will introduce students to the literature on crime and policing. Readings for the course will be from a broad range of disciplines, including sociology, criminology, law, and public policy.  Most weeks, the readings will include relevant “popular press” articles that will help situate the literature in the context of current debates. The course is organized in two parts. The first half will focus on the problems of crime and violence in urban environments. We will review classic and modern ideas and theories explaining crime and violence, and we will look at the evidence describing patterns and trends in crime in recent history. The second half of the course will focus on the approaches to confront crime and violence, with a strong emphasis on policing. We will review the literature on the relationship between crime and policing, and we will learn about the impact that policing practices have on individuals and their communities.

This course focuses on race, discrimination, and racial inequalities. The course will address three key questions: (1) What is race as perceived in the U.S. and Europe, and what are the sources of racial inequalities? (2) What does social science research tell us about patterns and trends of racial inequalities? (3) What policies can alleviate racial inequalities? The course will systematically adopt comparative perspectives focusing on the North American and European contexts. We will also address research on race and racial inequality within an interdisciplinary lens particularly building on sociology, economics, and social psychology.

This course is designed for advanced undergraduate students from Columbia University and Science Po (Paris). We aim for a class of 30 students (15 from each partner university). Class will take place once a week (for 2 hours). In addition, the Columbia TA will conduct a discussion section once a week in which Columbia and Sciences Po students will work together in small groups on class projects that will be presented over the course of the semester. The classes will be organized in a hybrid format. In each campus, the professor will teach his/her class in person and the two classes will be connected via Zoom. The Columbia and Science Po professors will thus co-teach a virtually connected class. The professors will closely coordinate and alternate in leading the lecture and discussion parts of each class.

This seminar is an opportunity to do original sociological research with the support of a faculty member, a teaching assistant, and your fellow classmates. Over the next two semesters you will formulate a research question; design a research strategy; collect and analyze data; and write up your findings. At the end of the academic year, you will submit a completed thesis.

The class is intended as scaffolding to support you in what can sometimes feel like a lonely and disorienting process. The goal is to balance structure to facilitate your work with freedom to develop your projects independently.

This seminar is open only to Sociology majors. Please email the professor for permission to join the course. 

Participants may elect to enroll in the 1-credit CWI independent study offered through the Sociology Department. CWI takes place Thursdays from 2-4pm in Knox Hall, room 509. The course ID for Fall 2025 is SOCI4043GU.

The Center for Wealth and Inequality (CWI), in this course, is a forum for students interested in social science topics broadly related to inequality. In particular, it will provide an opportunity for students to read and discuss the works presented in the weekly CWI seminar series, while also sharing and refining their own works in progress.  The CWI seminar series is sponsored by Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy (ISERP) and is devoted to the investigation of social and economic inequality.  The seminar invites speakers from both within and outside of Columbia to present recent papers covering a wide range of topics pertaining to inequality, such as poverty, labor market behavior, education, and the family.  The research topics and methodologies are at the cutting edge of the interdisciplinary study of wealth and inequality, as the CWI seminar invites speakers from multiple social science disciplines and fields. Past speakers include Annette Lareau, Adam Gamoran, Timothy Smeeding, Lisa Kahn, Mario Small, Rob Warren and Florencia Torche, among numerous others.

The primary preparation for these gatherings is to read the papers slated for presentation, whether written by an outside speaker or a student within the course. Students will meet to constructively critique these papers collectively, raising key questions and concepts for discussion and debate.  One student will serve as the discussion leader each week by kicking off the dialogue.  This student also will have the opportunity to prepare a review of the paper, if desired.  When discussing CWI seminar papers, the product of each meeting will be a shortlist of pertinent questions for the visiting speaker, which participants will be encouraged to ask during the Q&A following each seminar. When focusing on student papers, participants will provide detailed comments geared towards supporting further development of our peers’ work. We regularly will be joined by the CWI presenters.

The spirit behind the student independent study is one of collective student growth and learning through semi-structured discussion.  While the course will pose a relatively limited time commitment, students will be expected to participate actively, complete the readings, and regularly attend the CWI seminars.

This course surveys the relationship between sociology as a discipline and the body of thought, action and critique that coheres under the term queer theory. Many people understand these two projects to be constitutionally at odds. Sociology as a discipline concerns itself with the empirical study of, as Norbert Elias wrote, “the problem of human societies.” How we do this is distinct. Sociologists have a defined set of technical skills that make use of social categories and classifications. We organize individuals by behavior and identity, document diverse cultural milieus, and even attempt to quantify the demographic details of sexual identities, practices and communities. Queer theory, on the other hand, emerged as a field of academic thought in the early 1990’s, at the apex of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The urgency of the political moment demanded new analytical tools for thinking about gender, sexuality, medicine and bodies. Queer theorists took to task the restrictive categories of gender and sexual life that relegated gay men and lesbians to sociological studies of “deviant” people and practices, in favor of rich and pointed critiques of the organization of culture, institutions and politics that renders some people and practices deviant in the first place. Queer theorists document their suspicion of methods, of categories, and of knowledge practices themselves. Social science is often the target of such critiques.

So, is there actually a way to do something we might call queer sociology? Or is it, fundamentally, an oxymoron? As what we think of as data becomes “bigger” and ever more categorically precise, what use has sociology for queer theory? How can a body of thought that operates from an anti-categorical impulse inform empirical work that seeks, at least in some part, to identify and observe particular types of people and particular forms of social life? In this course, we will read a set of foundational texts in the queer theoretical tradition alongside sociology that makes use of queer phenomena, frameworks and world-making projects. Expect to cover topics like ephemera, ghosts, messy affect, political lesbianism, perversion and a variety of other things you don’t typically see on a sociology syllabus. Each week, we will survey a select set of orienting ideas from queer theory–the heterosexual matrix, heteronormativity, antidisciplinarity, and homonormativity–and examine the ways in which sociologists of sexuality aim to empiricize them. Each week’s readings will include a theoretical piece that outlines a perspective on culture, and a piece of social science that makes use of that same idea. We will learn the concepts that structure queer thought, along with the techniques that structure social science, in an effort to understand the differing ways people observe the world, understand it, and write about it. We will read these with an eye towards making connections between these odd bedfellows, and forging an approach to “queer methods” that will inform students’ own sociological imaginations.

This course introduces students to historical approaches in sociology and political science (and some economics). In the first part, the course surveys the major theoretical approaches and methodological traditions. Examples of the former are classic comparativist work (e.g. Skocpol’s study of revolutions), historist approaches (such as Sewell’s), or the historical institutionalist tradition (Mahoney, Thelen, Wimmer, etc.). In terms of methodological approaches, we will discuss classical Millean small-N comparisons, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, process tracing, actor-centered modeling, quantitative, large-N works, and causal inference type of research designs. In the second part, major topics in macro-comparative social sciences are examined, from world systems and empire to the origins of democracy.

The seminar will explore the Israeli-Palestinian (and Israeli-Arab) conflict from the beginning of the 20th century  until today. The first part of the seminar will focus on the historical background informing the conflict and leading  to the Palestinian refugee problem and the establishment of a Jewish, but not Palestinian, state in 1948. The  second part of the seminar focuses on Palestinian-Arab citizens in Israel, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and  Gaza, the settlement project, and possible political solutions, as well as the USA's role and its impact on the  conflict, the occupation, and the current Gaza war. 

Panel data or longitudinal data consist of multiple measures over time on a sample of individuals. These types of data occur extensively in both observational and experimental studies in social, behavioral, and health sciences. This course will provide an introduction to the principles and methods for the analysis of panel data. Whereas some supporting statistical theory will be given, emphasis will be on data analysis and interpretation of models for longitudinal data. Problems will be motivated by applications primarily in social sciences.