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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
An examination of crime, criminals, and crime-fighters. Topics include: violent urban youth gangs in America; the recruitment, socialization, argot, culture, worldviews, and ethics of professional criminals, both in America and in the international arena; the stages of criminal careers; the violence inherent in the drug trade; the trafficking of girls and women; the illegal immigration industry; white-collar scams, fraud, and financial depredations; identity theft; the work worlds and habits of mind of crime-fighters, with a special focus on the work of uniformed police officers, detectives, federal agents, and state and federal prosecutors; the symbolic representations of criminals and crime-fighters in American and international popular culture; and the crisis of public social order. Special attention to the nature of criminal investigation.
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3.00 Credits
Modern humans have moved to the city, a site with concentrated powers of various kinds, this move has effected irreversible change in human life. We will examine these forces through readings in urban theories as well as ethnographic studies. We will address themes such as the organization of urban life, the political economy of cities, housing and homelessness, and urban planning. The city is also the chief site of cultural production and meaning, and our scope of interest will range from studying subcultures, to reading graffiti, to analyzing monuments. Bearing in mind the inexorable social change of past decades, we will reconsider some classical thought on urban life in the context of postmodern discourse, conceptualize the post-industrial and global city, and conclude with an examination of the problems faced by cities in developing countries. This course is designed to provide students with a comprehensive introduction to urban studies. Students will become familiarized with both classical and modern urban theories, and in reading ethnographies they will have an opportunity to understand some fundamental methodological approaches to the study of the city.
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3.00 Credits
Althea Gibson to the Williams Sisters. Julius (Dr. J) Irving to Michael Jordan. Jesse Owens to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Throughout the 20th century, black athletes have broken through Jim Crow restraints, challenged racial stereotypes, and taken their sports to new heights of achievement. In this course, students will explore a range of black athletes in the 20th century, paying particular attention to the attitudes, stereotypes and experiences they endured. In addition, this course will prompt students to analyze the representation, perception, and commodification of black athletes in popular media forms. Students will trace trends, shifts and themes in representations of blackness across different sports and historical periods. Topics under study may include resistance against and affirmation of athletes as role models, racial slurs in sports broadcasting, common themes in commercialized images of the black male athlete, and distinctions in media coverage based on race and gender. Texts will include everything from critical essays and sociological studies to commercials and documentary films. In their final projects, students may put their newfound knowledge to the test by exploring their campus or hometown to investigate the role that race plays on their own playing field. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of black athleticism are manipulated to increase financial strength and institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to combat it.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
"This is obvious!" is what we say when we believe our point is irrefutable. But images are far less obvious than we may like to think. This course will create a forum for discussing the role of images in our lives, as well as the place of the visual in sociological inquiry. It will explore the variety of ways in which images -- and even vision itself -- are shaped by the social and cultural context in which they are embedded, develop skills for critical analysis of existing representations, and address the analytical possibilities and limitations of the study of signs and images. The course will touch upon a range of visual material, from advertizing to children's drawings, but the bulk of the course is dedicated to photography, both as an object of visual analysis and as, increasingly, a research method in social sciences. Topics for discussion include debates around truth in photography and the politics of representation, changing uses of photography in institutional settings, different photographic cultures and their anthropological and sociological significance, as well as the use of photography in social research. Primary sources for the discussions will be drawn from a variety of spheres, from Soviet propaganda posters to Balinese identity photographs, and will include the images we encounter in everyday life, media, politics, academia, "high" art and pop culture.
Prerequisite:
Open to all students
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3.00 Credits
Africa is a place of extremes: its nation-states are some of the world's youngest and poorest; its societies are some of the most diverse and most unequal; and its landscapes are some of the most stunning, fertile, and severe. This sociological study of the continent will focus on the larger sub-tropical or sub-Saharan region. We will utilize both macro-level and micro-level approach, connecting the workings of the state and other large-scale institutions such as markets and NGOs (nongovernment organizations) to the most intimate behaviors of individuals such as marrying, starting families, building households, making livelihoods, and migrating. By the end of the course, students will have familiarity with the most relevant (and controversial) topics in African affairs: religion, sexuality, gender, corruption, ethnic identity, HIV/AIDS, and health care. Students will also have a stronger understanding of Africa's place in the world and the processes that perpetuate its under-development.
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3.00 Credits
Calls for "immigration reform" abound in politics and the media. Legislation in border states (Arizona, Texas, Alabama) is national news, often sparking protests around the country. Communities of foreigners reside in small towns as well as big cities, making up 12 percent of the U.S. population. Similar tensions in Europe have resulted in anti-Muslim legislation and even violence. Yet is global migration a problem or an opportunity? In order to answer that question, we will analyze the social dimensions of global migration flows, focusing first on the politics of migration in the modern economic era and secondly on the migrant experience. We will look historically at how migration has been defined alternately as "good" and "bad" for societies, and discuss the most common arguments on either side. As case studies of large-scale migration, we will focus on three significant flows: from Asia to Western Europe; from West Africa to the U.S. and Europe; and from Latin America to the U.S.
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the historical development and changing dynamics of race in North America, the Caribbean, and South America. In doing so, we will take on the fundamental position that race is a meaningful classification of human bodies. The question we will keep in front of us at all times is this: How does social milieu determine the meaningfulness of race? Racial classifications, like all classifications, are collectively imagined, and appear mired in various spheres of social life. We will devote a fair amount of attention to the meaning of race in personal experience, economic production and distribution, political organization, and popular culture. The complexity of race will be explored within a number of writings by authors such as Michael Hanchard, Edwidge Dandicat, and Patricia Hill Collins. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which they confront, negotiate, and at times challenge dominant U.S. and/or European social hierarchies.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to explore, both theoretically and empirically, the theme of social structure and inequality in contemporary modern societies. One's position in social space largely determines one's consciousness, identity, values, attitudes, interest, and behavior. While inequality is ubiquitous, there are cross-cultural variations in the definition of status and consequent distribution of social conditions and opportunities among individuals. In modern societies, social space and individual status are closely interconnected with the economic system and, consequently, with the occupational structures and relations evolving from it. Currently, globalization and technological developments are rapidly transforming societies and patterns of inequality. In stable societies, changes in the economic and social sphere are evolutionary in nature. However, these changes come at an accelerated pace and are typically accompanied by initial chaos and turbulence in societies undergoing major systemic transformation (or even revolution). These societies provide excellent opportunities to study the relationship of social change and stratification. Therefore, an important focus of this course will also be on the systemic transition from state socialism to market democracies in Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the relationship between religious and environmental thought in the modern United States. Focusing on the complex and closely linked legacies of Christianity, secularism, and popular spirituality, we will explore the religious and anti-religious roots of contemporary environmental discourse. Along the way, we will pursue a set of vexing questions about environmental thought: Is environmentalism a religion? If so, what kind of religion is it? If not, why not (and why do we even ask)? Is anti-environmentalism religiously motivated? Could religion be the cause of our ecological crisis? Could it be the solution? For answers, we will look to the writings of thinkers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry, as well as a number of lesser-known authors. We will read these authors alongside recent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities to understand how their thinking was influenced by social and environmental trends such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and globalization. We will also ask how religion has intersected with gender, race, class, and ethnicity to shape environmental politics in the twenty-first century. Finally, we will pay particularly close attention to episodes of conflict and cooperation between the environmental movement and religious conservatives during the past forty years, and we will analyze popular religious media from this period alongside the writings and visual productions of environmentalists.
Prerequisite:
Environmental Studies 101 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course asks why people think and talk about climate change in such very different ways. Climate change is a physical phenomenon that can be observed, quantified, and measured. But it is also an idea, and as such it is subject to the vagaries of cultural interpretation. Despite scientific agreement about its existence and its causes, many people do not see climate change as a serious problem, or as a problem at all. Many others see it as the most serious problem our species has ever faced. What are the sources of this disparity? Why can't we agree about climate change? How does something as complex and confusing as climate change become a "problem" in the first place? This course will explore a broad array of factors, from religion to race, class to colonialism. It will focus especially closely on the communication of scientific knowledge, risk perception, and environmental ethics, and it will apply a range of theories from the social sciences and humanities to a set of concrete case studies In the climate change debate, culture matters. By investigating how culture shapes the politics and policy of climate change, students will develop the interpretive skills required to understand not just this most contentious of issues, but environmental issues in general.
Prerequisite:
ENVI 101
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