2007–2008 Sociology Courses
First-Year Studies: (Re)Constructing the Social: Subject, Field, Text
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the U.S.? What was the relationship of mothers to children in upper-class seventeenth-century French households? How do our contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other(s)”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists analyze and simultaneously create reality; what questions we ask; and what ways we use to explore our questions and arrive at our findings and conclusions. Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things we take for granted, for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar is to enable students to critically read sociological texts and also to become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is designed both to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship between the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text.
Borders, Boundaries, and Belonging
Level: Open
Semester: Year
International boundaries are often taken to be fixed and unchanging demarcations of nation-states and the quintessential expression of national sovereignty. This course examines how physical and social boundaries are made and policed through immigration controls. We begin by studying theories of international migration in order to understand how globalization has accelerated the flows of money and people around the world. Why do people migrate? How do economic, political, cultural, and social transnational linkages shape international migration? What are forced and voluntary migrations? Next we turn to the historical development of border controls in the early twentieth-century period of nation-state formation through the post 9/11 period. Why do we use passports? How are borders policed? How do techniques and practices such as classification, apprehension, detention, and deportation factor into the migration process? What is the role of border agents, human smugglers, NGOs, and private citizens in regulating the movement of people across international borders? Finally, we will investigate the construction of social boundaries and the process of citizenship making. How do everyday practices of boundary policing generate distinctions between licit and illicit flows and differences between citizens and noncitizens? How are immigrants and their children transforming traditional understandings of membership and belonging? We will ground our inquiry in texts analyzing immigration controls in the receiving countries from select regions in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Media and Popular Culture
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
The mass media profoundly shape everyday reality. We become aware of the world beyond our immediate experience through media representations. These do not simply convey information, but structure our understanding of society, the meaning of social categories, and our sense of self. In this course, we will learn how to use the tools of sociological analysis to systematically examine representations, audiences, and media industries, including their economic basis and modes of production. We will examine multiple media formats, including newspapers, television, movies, radio, magazines, advertising, and the Internet. Questions considered in the course will include: How does capitalism shape media content? How are cultural meanings and social identities produced, enacted, and changed through the mass media? How are alternative forms of media produced by subcultures and social movements? How and when are innovative cultural forms, identities, and products commodified by media industries? For conference, students will apply the analytic tools they have learned to their own analysis of some form of media.
Thinking Gender: Inequalities and Identities
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Gender is simultaneously a central form of organization within social institutions and an integral component of self-identity and social interaction. Gender is often easiest to see as an aspect of interaction, of how others see us and how we see ourselves. The embeddedness of gender in institutions, the intersection of gender with race and class, and resulting patterns of social inequality are less immediately perceivable, yet have been a central focus of sociological study of gender. In this course, we will study theories of gender from sociology, women’s studies, and queer and transgender studies, and we will compare various approaches to defining and studying gender identities and inequalities. Some of the topics we will examine include gender norms and expectations, dominant and alternative gender identities, labor markets, occupations, and domestic work; the legal system and gender discrimination; and the history of and possibilities for social change.
Race in a Global Context
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course is a comparative inquiry into the mechanisms of racial domination. First, we will review major theoretical approaches to the study of race. What is the difference between race and ethnicity? How have concepts of race changed over time? Are we seeing a return to biological frameworks of race through advancements in genetic technologies? Next, we will analyze the making and unmaking of race and systems of racial classification that divide and rank social groups. How is race (un)made? What forms of racial categorization can be found across different societies? Finally, we will examine various systems of racial classification across space and time in order to investigate how these are inscribed and reproduced through institutional forms of racial division and domination—namely, prejudice, discrimination, segregation, ghettoization, and exclusionary violence. What is the difference between prejudice and discrimination? Is segregation the same as ghettoization? What determines which groups will be segregated, ghettoized, expelled, or exterminated? By the end of the course, students will have learned to critically interrogate the commonly used concept of “racism” and acquired more useful analytical tools for understanding race as a major organizing principle in social life in the United States through a comparison with other international contexts. Readings will be based on sociological, anthropological, and historical studies of race relations in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe.
Health Policy/Health Activism
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
Experiences of health and illness are simultaneously deeply personal and embedded within complex social systems. Within the United States and in the rest of the world, not only is health care often a scarce resource that is unevenly distributed, but ill health is itself closely connected to broader societal inequalities. The goal of this course is to understand this intersection of inequality and health by exploring who gets sick and why, the organization and structure of medicine in the United States and other countries, the development and consequences of health care policies, and the role of activism and community-based research in creating social change. In the first semester, we will examine the social production of illness, the roles of medical professionals, the doctor-patient relationship, the structure of the U.S. health care system, and the organization of health care in other countries. In the second semester, we will continue to study social epidemiology, as well as critically examining health campaigns, community-based research, and health activism. There will be a service-learning component to the course, involving work with a community health organization or agency. For conference, students may study a specific health issue or a health care policy question, or they may develop a research proposal addressing a question relevant to their community placement.
Open to sophomores and above.
Gender and Power in the “Muslim” World
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
When gender in the Muslim world is the object of our scrutiny, invariably the emphasis is on women’s subordination to men. “Gender” then is frequently used interchangeably with “women” rather than with both sexes; and both (Muslim) men and women tend to be located outside history, in some eternal state of being. Colonial authors, mass media analysts, regimes and political parties of the left and right (within the Muslim world and external to it), and many feminists all contribute to this rather limited vision. We will start with an analysis of the various reasons for existing biases with regard to thinking about gender in the “Muslim” world, whereby gender is “naturalized” rather than historicized. We will look at the semiotics of gender historically and in the contemporary moment, and, by examining its implications for notions of “Muslim” men and women, masculinity and femininity, we will strive to arrive at a different sensibility and methodology regarding the realities of gender and power. Contrary to conventional approaches, we will deploy historical, comparative, and social constructivist approaches to understanding the phenomena under study. In other words, rather than adopting an essentialist approach to relations of gender and power, we will attempt to situate these practices in context. The intent is to see how power is deployed in the very manner in which gender in the Middle East is represented. We will turn from an examination of the semiotics of gender to the historical processes through which the current engendering of social relations and hierarchies between the sexes has been reproduced, challenged, transgressed, and transformed. In the process, we will attempt to generate a more complex and nuanced understanding, one that is attentive to ambiguities and contradictions. Given the limitations of existing literature on the topic, our analysis is not intended to be a comprehensive accounting of gendered lives and struggles in the geographical spaces under study. Instead, we will attempt to address a number of questions such as, What are the different conceptual frameworks that inform our perceptions of gender in North Africa and West Asia? What politics and histories are embedded in different “ways of seeing”? What are the various discursive and material forces that inform men’s and women’s lives in the places under scrutiny, and how do they serve to privilege men over women? How does class play into the social relations between the sexes? What constitutes the “good” man and/or woman at different historical periods? How do different institutions of state and civil society provide openings for resistance to the status quo? How do colonial moments and those of war change the dynamics regarding gender and power? What new forms of knowledge are being produced that challenge and contest existing ideas and realities on the ground? Our exploration of these questions will be framed by different theoretical concerns such as those of feminist and postcolonial thought and those of political economy. We will draw on scholarly, literary, and visual materials. Students will be encouraged to undertake theoretical research on the topic that relies on primary sources.