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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Examining monographs, novels, film, photography, poetry, government records, and court cases, we will explore a variety of immigrant groups and time periods--from the Irish of the mid-19th century to Jamaicans, Mexicans, and the Vietnamese today. We will focus on questions of identity--how immigrants have come to understand themselves racially and ethnically over time--and questions of power--where immigrants have been located within America's developing racial order and what difference this has made in their everyday lives--their jobs, homes, families, and opportunities.
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3.00 Credits
Over the last decade, "whiteness studies" has been all the rage in academic disciplines as diverse as law and literature, anthropology and art. This course will be a high-level introduction to and critical appraisal of this burgeoning literature-particularly as it relates to American studies. We will examine some of its key texts from its earliest roots among African-American scholars, to its more recent incarnations in US history, literary criticism, critical race and legal studies, sociology, anthropology, and more. We will also examine recent attempts--both scholarly and popular--to make sense of this literature. Along the way, we will focus on the following key questions: What is "whiteness studies"? Where did it come from? What is it so popular now? What are some of its contributions and limitations? What is its future?
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3.00 Credits
All her life Edith Wharton sat on the edge of change. All her life she had one foot in the past and one firmly in the present. Her vision looked ahead to America's trans-national and cosmopolitan future as much as it found comforts and recognitions in the country's more provincial past. In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton suggested that the "small society into which [she] was born was 'good' in the most prosaic sense of the term, and its only interest, for the generality of readers, lies in the fact of its total extinction, and for the imaginative few, in the recognition of the moral treasures that went with it." A rather ambiguous statement to be sure. Wharton's elegiac lament for the past is always conflicted, both in her fiction and in how she lived her own life-like her friend Henry James and a number of her other acquaintances, Wharton became one of those transnational, cosmopolitan, expatriates who helped shape twentieth-century America. She sat in the midst of a broad and influential group of cultural and intellectual figures whose works addressed, contested, fomented, resisted, and embraced the sweeping social changes America underwent in the period following the conclusion of the Civil War and leading up to the onset of World War I. Topics for discussion will include the idea of cosmopolitanism; constructions of citizenship, of race, of nation; the notion of home and exile; emerging trans-nationalism--both individual and national; and political imperialism, particularly through the "new" politics of Theodore Roosevelt. This is not a course on Edith Wharton, but an investigation which will use Wharton's writings as a medium through which we will examine some of those cultural changes that revolutionized modern America and changed the world. Readings: selected novels, short stories, and writings of Edith Wharton; selected works of Henry James; selections from Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, William James, Theodore Roosevelt, Randolf Bourne, George Santayana, Paul Bourget, T. Jackson Lears, E.B. Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, Ruth Benedict, James Clifford, Alan Trachtenberg, Richard Bushman, and Rebecca Edwards. Requirements: Tentative: participation in class discussions 20%; series of one-page textual analyses 20%; oral presentation 15%; final research essay 45%.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, students will examine the key issues of race and ethnicity in U.S. Latina/o literary production, particularly in the works of Afro-Latina/o, Andean-Latina/o (and other Latinos of indigenous descent), and Asian-Latina/o authors. The range of races, ethnicities, and nationalities of the established and emerging authors studied in the course will enhance the students' understanding of the complexity and heterogeneity of that group that we call "Latinos." The course will be divided into three major units: Caribbean, Central American, and South American Latinos. Students will read works by migrants from a range of countries, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panamá, Perú, Ecuador, Uruguay and Colombia. This course will have a service-learning component. Students will be required to spend two hours per week volunteering at the local Hispanic community center Casa de Amistad. The course will be conducted in Spanish. Participation, frequent short essays, a journal, midterm, final exam, and final paper will determine the final grade.
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3.00 Credits
This course undertakes a broad examination of black politics in multiracial America. Racial issues have provoked crises in American politics; changes in racial status have prompted American political institutions to operate in distinctive ways. The course examines the interface of black politics with and within the American political system. How successful have blacks been as they attempted to penetrate the electoral system in the post civil rights era. What conflicts and controversies have arisen as African Americans have sought to integrate the American system of power. Now that the laws have been changed to permit limited integration, should African Americans integrate politically, that is should they attempt to 'deracialize' their political appeals and strategy, with an effort to "crossover politically;" are some approaches such as those of President Barack Obama "not black enough?" What internal political challenges do African Americans face; some such as the increasing importance of class and socioeconomic factors, as well as gender and sexuality may reshape the definition of the black community Finally how stable will the past patterns and political organizations and institutions of African American politics be, as America and American politics becomes increasingly multiracial.
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3.00 Credits
The purpose of this course is to examine the psychological aspects of racial and ethnic identity development in the United States. This course will look at the general ideas of identity development from a psychological basis as well as the personal identities of American groups. The main course objectives are: to increase students' cultural awareness of their own and others' racial and ethnic identities; to develop relevant knowledge of about identity constructs in understanding different populations; and, to develop critical thinking skills in studying and evaluating research on the role of racial and ethnic identity development in psychological processes and human behavior.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the impact of the social world on the educational performances of adolescents. The relationship between social contexts, such as the family, neighborhood, school, peer network, and religion, and adolescent achievement will be explored. Theoretical and empirical research on the impact of these social contexts will also be explored. Finally, how all the contexts work simultaneously to influence the educational performance of adolescents will be discussed.
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3.00 Credits
This course will introduce you to theoretical interpretations of criminal behavior, empirical research on crime in diverse contexts, and policy debates on crime control and punishment. Our intent will be to raise critical questions and to challenge commonly held views about the nature of crime and punishment in the United States today. As students of sociology, we will operate under the assumption that crime and punishment are social phenomena; they can only be understood by analyzing their relationship to the broader social, political, and cultural context in which they exist. We shall explore a variety of theoretical perspectives, both classical and contemporary, that attempt to uncover the causes, etiology, and solutions of the problem of criminal behavior. This class cannot be taken if the student has previously taken SOC 30732 because of content overlap.
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3.00 Credits
A study of the dynamic process of formation and development of the society of the United States and its cultural, religious, and racial pluralism; a review of the history and theory of interethnic relations, and their manifestation in the basic institutions of family, education, religion, economics, and government.
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3.00 Credits
The intent of this demography course is to familiarize students with basic statistical methods and techniques that are applied to the study of population data. The course will offer students an opportunity to gain "hands-on" experience with manipulating quantitative data and generating results. The backdrop for the class is ethnic status. Because we will have access to social data for major ethnic categories (e.g., white, African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American), one of the byproducts of learning the methods and techniques of demographic analysis will be a comparative study of ethnic groups across several social dimensions. The first topic will be population growth. This will include discussions about birth rates, mortality rates, immigration, emigration, and how to generate population estimates. Another topic will be a broader discussion of rates that will distinguish incidence rates from prevalence rates, and show how they are applied to generate indicators of health, crime, school enrollment, service usage, and other social statistics. A review of direct and indirect standardization techniques, plus a review of how to analyze changing rates, will follow this discussion. Most rate changes can be attributable to either change in behaviors or population, or changes in both. How you decompose crude differences into their component parts is an essential step in understanding the dynamics of social phenomenon. This will be followed by a review of how we collect and study such social attainments as education, occupation, and income. Here we will examine issues of measurement (e.g., do we count years of attendance or credential earned) and various ways to generate difference measure (e.g., Gini index, index of dissimilarity, mean differences). This discussion will also include ways to decompose observed differences and generate hypothetical estimates of attainment via regression and discrete Markov processes. The final area to be reviewed will be the spatial distribution of residences in specified geographic locals. The major issues of discussion will be the heterogeneity or homogeneity of neighborhoods with regard to family income, educational background, ethnicity, or immigrant status.
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