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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
Why won't Tiffany sell turquoise jewelry when they're famous for putting jewelry in turquoise boxes? How do we make sense of governments that use tax dollars to subsidize certain types of culture that wealthy people disproportionately enjoy? Why is it so hard to figure out how much something costs in an art gallery? What happens when economists stop using gross domestic product (GDP) to evaluate countries and start evaluating them based on happiness? If experts can't tell the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine in blind taste tests, why are expensive wines so expensive, and how did these people become experts anyway? This is a course about the interplay between economy, society and culture, and these are just a few of the questions we'll be discussing. The course introduces an economic approach to the study of culture, and asks you to critically interrogate dominant perspectives on the meaning of value and worth.
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1.00 Credits
This course explores issues in contemporary U.S. family life, as illuminated by historical experience. Guiding questions include: What different forms do family arrangements take? How and on what basis are families produced? How are gender, racial, ethnic, and class differences reflected in and produced by family life? What is and what should be the relationship between family and state, as expressed in law and public policy (e.g., divorce, welfare, and access to legal marriage)?
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1.00 Credits
We usually think of gender as a trait, a noun. People have a gender. Someone is a woman or a man. During this course, we will work to see gender as a verb as well. To gender something is to make it feminine or masculine. And actions, unlike objects, are not fixed. They can happen in unexpected ways. They can fail. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate gender, not only as an element of individual personhood, but as a changeable process which forms both individuals and the social world more broadly. As we do this, we will also note the ways that gender is always already inflected and shaped by other structures of inequality and difference such as race, class, and sexuality. During the first half of the course, we will look at the multiple ways in which both gender and sex are produced, in thought and in action, in formal edicts and intimate relations, symbolically and on the body itself. In the second half of the course, we will look at work and family--to trace the ways gendered selves are shaped in daily practice within these sites and to trace the consequences of these emergent selves for the institutions in which they are formed. In the last week of the course we will turn to the realm of international relations, to investigate how macro processes are structured with reference to gendered understandings. Throughout the semester, we will be attentive to the links between power, inequality, meaning and selfhood, noting where particular gendered selves produce domination and constraint and where they make change imaginable.
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1.00 Credits
This course explores the sociological dynamics of media, from traditional mass media to new media forms. Many media formats will be considered, including radio, film, television, and Internet, with a focus on critical social, political, and economic perspectives and controversies. In particular, the course will take up questions of representation, participation, consumerism, pleasure, and power that have dominated social thinking on the media since the Frankfurt School. Topics will include the corporate consolidation of media, alternative and indie media, the development of media for subjugated populations, media and social control, and the role of new media in transforming social relations. Students will engage historical and theoretical texts and will be asked to participate in media processes, including production, interpretation, and critique.
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1.00 Credits
This course will address the role of power, culture, race/ethnicity, gender, and class on the development of schools as a social institution and within school dynamics and pedagogy. We will cover the following topics: philosophical debates about pedagogy with readings from Dewey, Piaget, Skinner, Bruner, and Friere; the origins of schools as an institution; the organization of schools with readings about tracking, charter schools, private schools, and school vouchers; the influence of power and political movements on both the explicit and hidden curriculum; educational reforms such as progressive education, the back-to-basics movement, the whole-language movement, the standards movement, and high-stakes testing; and the influence of language, labeling, cultural capital, and social capital on student learning. We also will examine international differences in schools and schooling.
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1.00 Credits
The purpose of the seminar is to help senior sociology majors develop their senior essay projects by introducing them to the conceptual challenges and practical problems of sociological research. The seminar meetings will be devoted primarily to helping students advance their own research projects.
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1.25 Credits
Our focus will be on understanding the role of social factors (such as income, work environment, social cohesion, food, and transportation systems) in determining the health risks of individuals; considering the efficacy, appropriateness, and ethical ramifications of various public health interventions; and learning about the historical antecedents of the contemporary community health center model of care in response to the needs of vulnerable populations. We will explore the concept of social medicine, the importance of vocabulary, and the complexity of any categorization of persons in discussions of health and illness, ethical issues related to in the generation and utilization of community-based research, the role of place in the variability of health risk, and the idea of just health care.
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1.00 Credits
This introductory course is designed for students without prior Spanish language study and focuses on the development of receptive and productive language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking) within a strong cultural frame.
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1.00 Credits
This course provides an intense review of elementary Spanish to allow students to advance to the intermediate level. Emphasis is placed on the four basic skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Attention is also given to cultural issues concerning the Spanish-speaking world. Conversational fluency is practiced and highly expected.
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1.00 Credits
This intermediate language course places continued emphasis on the development of receptive and productive language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking), with a strong cultural component. The sequence SPAN111 and SPAN112 seeks to expand students' active and passive knowledge of vocabulary and grammar while developing more fully their writing and speaking skills. Students gain experience in using different registers of Spanish, from informal to formal.
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