Lower Level Coursework in Sociology

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A survey of the substantive areas of study and the theoretical and methodological tools of the discipline of sociology.

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Upper Level Coursework in Sociology

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Sociological and social psychological perspectives are used to explore aspects of the development, maintenance and dissolution of intimate social relationships, especially those characterized as marriage and family relationships. Prereq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.

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Environmental sociology examines the relationship between human communities and the natural environment in the modern world. In particular, it focuses on how political, economic and cultural institutions shape our interactions with the natural environment. This course also considers how societies are responding to environmental problems on a global and local level, with special attention to the intersection of environmental problems and social inequality. Specific topics of study may include industrial pollution, environmental ideologies, global climate change, and natural disasters, among others.

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In this course, students learn to think theoretically about the relations between self and society, through the study of theories in sociology and related fields regarding subjectivity, social identity and power. Approaches covered include symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Students examine these theories by considering relevant topics such as cultural identity and difference, media images and postmodernity. Prereq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent. Counts toward SOCIOLOGY and ANSO theory-intensive requirements.

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(WS 1) This course is designed to familiarize students with women's experiences as well as with the ways in which society shapes notions of gender. The course also provides ways to identify and analyze how a society's notions of gender shape the ways in which a society sees and organizes itself. Class members examine the construction of women's social roles and their personal experiences, discussing points of congruence and dissonance. In this interdisciplinary course, reading and discussion material are drawn from fields such as religion, sociology, psychology, political science and literature, so students may examine the views, status and contributions of women. Class sessions consist of lectures, guest speakers, films, and discussion.

These courses cover topics being offered on a one-time basis, or for the first time, before being added formally to the curriculum. Prerequisites vary.

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The class includes discussion and an intensive service learning component. The sociology of childhood presents two insights: childhood is a lived experience and a structural form. As a lived experience, children actively create meaning and engage in social processes that make them a part of society from birth. Children play, learn, question, suffer, challenge, and create. They are not just ""under development"" or ""being socialized,"" but active in contributing to their own childhoods and to society.

Why do we care about some social problems and yet ignore others that are possibly more harmful? This course is not an in-depth study of any one social problem nor is it a survey of social problems in our society. Rather this course will examine how and why we think about social problems and how we respond to them (or do not respond). Using the theoretical perspective of social constructionism, students will examine how social problems are socially constructed and how different organizations and constituencies attempt to frame them in different ways. Students will learn that the way we define and interpret social problems is based on human activity and claims-making, which both reflect and perpetuate larger cultural and social forces. The principles and concepts learned in this course will be useful for critical analysis of social problems, statistics, inequality, public policy, politics, media, advocacy, and popular opinion. The course fulfills a theory-intensive requirement for sociology majors. Prereq: Entry level sociology or anthropology course or instructor consent.

This course applies sociological principles to health, illness, and health care. In order for students to fully develop an understanding in this context, a variety of perspectives will be explored and critiqued including that of patients, providers and society. This draws on foundational disciplines at the broader level and frames them into the biomedical experience. For example, sociological constructs of age, gender, ethnicity, and social class; psychosocial aspects of personal illness experience, historical and political perspectives of dominance, regulation and governance of providers and health care organizations will be the multidisciplinary topics covered. Other topics may include but are not limited to: history of 'western' medicine, models of illness, stress and well-being, social stratification of illness, health demography, medicalization and de-medicalization of illness, disability, and patient-provider relationships. A combination of reading, discussion, reflective activities, and paper/project composition will be used to facilitate comprehension of the course material.

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Sociology of Everyday Life focuses on the daily details of how people interact with each other and the consequences of those interactions. Social interactions help create and maintain relationships, social divisions, institutions, social structure, and cultural forces that make up our world and shape our differing subjective experiences. Some of the topics will include interpersonal relationships, emotion work, self-narratives, negotiating a working consensus, saving face, politics of language, identity, constructing normality and deviance, institutional talk, impression management, social control, and politics of reality. Prerequisite is SCSS 001 or instructor's permission.

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This course will focus on the importance of listening and strategies for how to listen more effectively. Students will have an interdisciplinary experience drawing from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and communication studies to understand the complexity of listening. The curriculum will cover how various factors affect one’s ability to listen, including culture, technology, conflict, politics, religion, social status, power, gender, and interpersonal relations. The class will also explore how effective listening can contribute to improved dialogue, research projects, conflict resolution, work contexts,healing, and personal relationships. The course will rely on student-led discussion and listening, reflective writing, community engagement activities, and cultural analysis assignments.

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This course focuses on the way that race, gender, disability, and poverty are organized and configured through public policy, social structure, and public discourse. Prereq; Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor consent. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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In this course we will explore relationships between families and the public sphere. The complexities of understanding how families are both shaped by and shape public culture lead us to an interdisciplinary approach to exploring families in context that includes attention to media, public policy, law, and community engagement. Contemporary concerns over families—what they look like, who they are, how they are shaped by society, how their “legitimacy” is legislated—have become subjects of fierce public debates in recent years. We will explore in particular the avenues through which “the state” legislates families, public debates emerge in the media, and citizens engage in public actions and dialogues over the meaning and shape of contemporary families. Family has always been a site of shifting and contested meanings. Society has investments in defining and regulating families in particular ways, and families, in turn have their own stakes in how they are seen, recognized, and provided for in the public realm of rights, benefits, and obligations associated with citizenship. Indeed, family will be explored as an arena of public debate about the meaning of citizenship. We will, as a class, consider academic and political debates about the meanings of family, as well as participate in public education and community engagement around contemporary local and national issues concerning the diversity of families.

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This course examines various ways that sociologists think about social structure and social institutions. Sociologists use the terms ""social structure"" and ""social institutions"" to refer to broad patterns of social organization that influence the lives of individuals, sometimes without their knowledge. Drawing from important theoretical works, we will explore the worts of structures and institutions that sociologists believe characterize modern societies, as well as considering where these structures come from and how they change over time. Topics include social stratificaiton, systems of norms and values, language and culture, bureaucracy, and social conflict and revolution. Sociology and ANSO majors may use this course to satisfy one of their ""theory-intensive"" requirements. Prerequisite is one sociology or anthropology course or instructor's permission.

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This course explores the relationship between gender and socio-cultural definitions of mental health and illness, and examines the history of the treatment of women within the major settings of the mental health system; psychiatry, psychoanalysis and asylum. The first major goal is to understand the social relations of power within which psychiatry emerged and within which women became defined as "hysterical", "irrational" or "mad". A second goal is to chart the relationship between women's social roles and the experience and treatment of mental illness, making use of autobiographical and fictional accounts by women, films and other materials. Prereq.: One entry level sociology or anthropology course or Introduction to Women's Studies (WS 75/SCSS 75/ENG 75) or instructor consent. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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This course will explore social, cultural, individual, and structural definitions of “normal” and “abnormal” in the United States. We will consider this issue through a range of interdisciplinary sources including media, literature, ethnography, history, science, and public policy. The course will address such issues as disability, sexuality, gender, race, and socioeconomic status in an attempt to understand how social definitions of normality shape our views of ourselves and others, as well as how they are implicated in the maintenance of power relations. We will consider the ways understandings of normal are contested and shifting in the contemporary United States at individual, community, cultural, and structural levels of society. This is a theory-intensive course.

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A sociological study of the youthful offender in American society. Special emphasis is placed on theories of youthful crime, societal responses that have impacts on definitions of youthful crime and subsequent public policy, research methodologies employed in understanding the quality and quantity of youthful crime, predicting youthful crime, and social control associated with youthful behavior defined as being negative. Prereq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.

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The aim of this course is to unearth and analyze the social context of food production, distribution, and consumption. Students will examine social identities represented and reproduced in food consumption, food regulation and food-based activism, and cultural differences in the preparation and eating of food, among other topics. The course will focus mainly on food in the United States but may also consider comparisons with other countries. Materials for the course include works written by sociologists and anthropologists as well as popular examinations of the food industry and food policy. Pre-req: one entry-level sociology or anthropology course.

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Restorative justice is a perspective that views crime as a harm against people and the community, which needs to be addressed through the involvement of offenders, victims, and the community. This course provides an introduction to the principles and practices behind restorative justice. The course is designed to allow students to struggle along with the experts in trying to navigate the opportunities and challenges, the success stories and the pitfalls that accompany restorative justice programs. In the process, students will explore questions about justice, crime, imprisonment, punishment, rehabilitation, forgiveness, and the purpose of a legal system.

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Courses listed as selected topics in sociology are either one-time offerings or are courses that have not been added formally to the curriculum. Prerequisites vary. Availability of graduate credit is course-specific.

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General facts and theories with respect to crime, the criminal and his or her treatment by society; emphasis is on the theories of causation and criminal behavior and problems in prison treatment, probation, and parole. Prereq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.

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A focus on a sociological exploration of the relationship between poverty and current social concerns, the changing nature of poverty, changes in social responses to poverty, with a special emphasis on public policy implications. Prereq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.

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Descriptive and inferential statistics most often used in social science research are examined, with an emphasis on statistics as communication tools; includes development of skills in formula reading, interpreting statistical outcomes and selecting appropriate statistics for analysis of various research questions and data. Counts toward SOCIOLOGY and ANSO methods-intensive requirements.

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Survey of selected research methods used in sociology, with varying emphasis on survey, documentary, observational, archival and other techniques, both qualitative and quantitative. Counts toward SOCIOLOGY and ANSO methods- intensive requirements.

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This course examines the organization and experience of work in the modern American economy, using both classical and contemporary sociological writings. We will pay special attention to how the workplace and labor market are connected to inequalities of race, class, and gender. The course also will examine the growth of flexible manufacturing and service sector employment in the United States and the corresponding rise of contingent and insecure work. Finally, we will discuss several perspectives on the relationship between work and family structure. Prereq: One entry-level sociology or anthropology course.

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An examination of the nature of social inequality based upon conceptions of race and ethnicity. Emphasis is on the economic and power relationships that have characterized the history of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States. Prereq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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Qualitative interviewing is a sociological research method that allows the researcher to look at how participants interpret and make sense of life events, and to understand participants’ stories through their own words. As a method, it is distinct from surveys, polls, or journalistic interviews. In this course, readings, discussion, and assignments will teach qualitative interviewing for two purposes. First, students will develop skills in this important sociological method. Second, students will explore an important sociological topic through qualitative interviewing, preparation, and interpretation of the interviews.

Restrictions:

Students with a classification of Freshman may not enroll.

Enrollment is limited to Professional Health Care or Undergraduate level students.

This course is an exercise in the application of sociological theory, concepts and methods to the study of African-Americans. The focus of the course is the socio-historical context of the African-American experience. Students examine the social institutions of United States society as they relate to the African-American experience and the subcultural institutions established by African-Americans. Prerq.: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.

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In its broadest sense, the course is about how definitions of ""badness"" are created in society and culture and attached to people, actions, places, and things. The sociological concept ""deviance"" can take the place of the word ""badness"" in taht sentence. This process is political and has a great deal to do with power, including the power of the state. The premise of the course is that deviance is always relative to time, place, power, authority, and even person. Pre-requisite: Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent. Counts toward SOC and ANSO theory-intensive requirements, Values and Ethics AOI, and LPS fulfillment.

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In this course, students will learn how narratives of grief are constructed, experienced, debated, politicized, and pathologized. We will examine various aspects of grief including cultural difference, social policing, media portrayals, and theoretical debates. Students will learn how tragedy and grief are used to sell politics and products and what implications this has on individual and cultural understandings of loss. This course is reading and writing intensive. Prereq: one entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor consent.

This course is a critical, in-depth examination of contemporary feminist theories of subjectivity. The central concern is for students to gain an understanding of the relationships between sexual difference, subjectivity and social relations of power. Students explore theories that address the psychic and subjective roots of relations of gender, power and domination, as well as the socio- historical dimensions of gender subjectivity. Materials and the approach used in the course are interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, literary criticism, film studies, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Prereq.: Introduction to Women's Studies (WS 75/SCSS 75/ENG 75) or one entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructors consent. Counts toward SOC and ANSO theory-intensive requirements. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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This course examines class, race, and gender inequality in the United States by combining hands-on experiences with careful consideration of sociological theory. Through service learning, reading, writing and classroom discussion, students will evaluate the effectiveness of social theory to explain stratification in the United States as well as responses to structural inequality. Students must commit to working at a service learning partner site eight hours per week. Counts toward SOC and ANSO theory-intensive requirement.

This course examines gender and violence, including the social construction of the problem, interdisciplinary theoretical explanations, and the social and cultural contexts. This course also explores how media, politics, and popular discourse impact policy for intervention and prevention, and individual understandings of gender and violence. Prereq: SCSA 2-25 or SCSS 1-25 or SCSS 75/ENG 75/WS 75 or instructor consent. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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The rate of imprisonment has rapidly increased since the 1970s with the implementation of the War on Drugs, making the United States the world’s leader in incarceration. This course will examine mass incarceration in the United States, its origins, trends, and the laws and policies that have directly and indirectly contributed to it. We will explore the effects of mass incarceration on society and attempt to answer the following questions: How did we get here? What led to the U.S. leading all nations in incarceration? How has racial and class inequality in incarceration become so glaring in incarceration? What are the consequences of high rates of incarceration and what can we do about it?

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This course will explore social, cultural, individual, and structural definitions of “normal” and “abnormal” in the United States. We will consider this issue through a range of interdisciplinary sources including media, literature, ethnography, history, science, and public policy. The course will address such issues as disability, sexuality, gender, race, and socioeconomic status in an attempt to understand how social definitions of normality shape our views of ourselves and others, as well as how they are implicated in the maintenance of power relations. We will consider the ways understandings of normal are contested and shifting in the contemporary United States at individual, community, cultural, and structural levels of society. This is a theory-intensive course.

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How do we respond to death and why? Using a sociological lens, this course examines historical and contemporary perspectives on death, dying, and bereavement. Students will expolore variations in attitudes and rituals concerning death, dying, funerals, and memorialization. Though the experiences of death, dying, and bereavement are intensely personal, they are shaped by social, political, legal, and cultural forces. These experiences also vary by culture, social class, age, race, gender, and religion. Other topics include the politics of death and the influence of the funeral industry. This course is reading and writing intensive. Prerequisite: one entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor consent.

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The course combines focused domestic and/or international travel and critical inquiry themed by social and cultural questions specific to the site/s visited. Student work typically includes pre-trip course assignments, in-trip lectures and discussions, and post-trip completion and submission/presentation of written work. The seminar is led by faculty who design, oversee, and direct the course and evaluate student work. Students are required to reflect on themselves as observers of the socialcultural sciences, artifacts, and peoples encountered, and they are asked to consider the implications of their presence and participation in the inquiry for the nature of the information they produce as well as the ethics of that production and subsequent use. No prerequisites.

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Directed independent study and/or research in a problem area selected by the student and not otherwise provided for in a regularly scheduled course. Prereq.: Sociology major, senior standing, overall GPA of at least 3.0, completion of not less than 18 hours of sociology courses, instructor's consent and department approval.

Restrictions:

Students with a classification of Freshman, Junior or Sophomore may not enroll.

Enrollment is limited to students with an major in Sociology.

The internship provides an opportunity for practical application of theoretical and research issues in approved work situations, with faculty supervision, guidance and evaluation. Prereq.: Sociology major, completion of 15 hours of sociology courses and 60 hours of college credit with overall GPA of at least 2.75, instructor's consent and department approval. The internship is graded and may be counted toward major.

Restrictions:

Students with a classification of Freshman or Sophomore may not enroll.

Enrollment is limited to students with an major in Sociology.

The senior capstone course is a culmination of a student's study of his/her major. The semester-long course, meeting as a seminar, asks students to propose, pursue, and complete an independent project of inquiry, to be negotiated in its detail with the faculty member, that will result in a completed document and an oral presentation. The student project should draw on the practices of inquiry and analysis found in the coursework and reading common to the major area and reflect the student's academic experience in the major. Prerequisite: Senior major in sociology; anthropology/sociology; or rhetoric, media, and social change.

Restrictions:

Students with a classification of Freshman, Junior or Sophomore may not enroll.

Enrollment is limited to students with an major in Anthropology/Sociology or Sociology.