Department website: http://soc.jhu.edu/
The Department of Sociology concentrates on two broad areas at the graduate and undergraduate levels: Global social change, which focuses on cross-national, comparative research; and social inequality, which primarily focuses on family, education, work, race, gender, policy, and immigration.
These concentrations trace back to the department’s founding in 1959 by renowned American sociologist James Coleman. The department has since earned a reputation as one of the most selective, personalized sociology departments in the U.S. and offers a uniquely intimate scholarly atmosphere in which faculty and students interact and collaborate frequently.
Scholars in the department share a wide variety of interests and interdisciplinary partnerships. Students are given flexible parameters for their study, and several faculty members have been honored with joint appointments in other Johns Hopkins University schools and divisions. The department shares a unique relationship with the Bloomberg School of Public Health, which offers faculty and students access to first-rate collaborations in fields such as population and demography, mental health and mental hygiene, and healthcare organization. The department is also proudly partnered with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and is committed to building and maintaining strong foundations in quantitative research methods.
Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD) Honor Society
In spring 2006, the Sociology department was awarded a chapter of the AKD sociology honor society. The chapter welcomed eleven new initiates that year, two faculty members, two new graduate students, and seven undergraduates. AKD now has over 100 members.
AKD is an open, democratic, international society of scholars dedicated to the ideal of Athropon Katamanthanein Diakonesein or “to investigate humanity for the purpose of service.” AKD seeks to acknowledge and promote excellence in scholarship in the study of sociology, the research of social problems, and other social and intellectual activities that will lead to improvement of the human condition. AKD was founded at the University of Southern California in 1920 and affiliated with the Association of College Honor Societies in 1967. There are more than 97,000 lifetime members and over 600 chapters of the Society. These are persons with academic records showing excellence in sociology.
Initiates receive a chapter pin, a certificate of membership, and a membership activation form. Members who submit completed activation forms receive a one-year subscription to Sociological Inquiry, the official journal of the Society, the Alpha Kappa Delta Newsletter, election materials, and other services. In addition, the Society sponsors student paper contests, provides honoraria for initiation speakers, provides funds for student travel to regional sociological meetings, funds research symposia, sponsors a distinguished lecture series at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, and contributes annually to the ASA Minority Scholarship Fund. AKD members wear AKD honor cords at graduation ceremonies. AKD chapters are important in the academic, professional, and social lives of student and faculty members. They provide opportunities for initiating and sharing activities in keeping with the purposes of the Society.
To be eligible for membership, majors must have at least junior year standing, an overall GPA of at least 3.0, a sociology GPA of at least 3.5, and have taken at least four courses in sociology.
Election to Alpha Kappa Delta is without regard to race, creed, or national origin. For more information, interested students should contact the AKD Faculty Chapter Representatives.
James S. Coleman Award
This award was established by the Department of Sociology in 1994 in honor of Dr. James S. Coleman, first chair of the department. The award is for outstanding academic achievement by a senior majoring in sociology.
Facilities
Each resident graduate student is provided office or desk space to conduct their studies and research. In addition, the department has a computer lab with a network of computers and printers for graduate student use. Close working relationships exist with other JHU Centers & Programs which provide excellent opportunities for research training.
Financial Aid
The department provides five years of financial aid for all students who are in good academic standing.
The department has a number of assistantships that are awarded each year to graduate students in the Ph.D. program. Opportunities are also available for graduate students to work as salaried research assistants with members of the Sociology faculty and staff at associated research centers.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
The course introduces students to the discipline of sociology. You will learn about (a) theoretical approaches in sociology; (b) some of the subject matters that sociologists study, including inequality, capitalism, labor, the state, social control, race, gender, sexuality, culture, religion, population dynamics, and health; and (c) sociological methods. Most importantly, you will learn (d) how to see the world as a sociologist. That is, you will become a sociologist.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course will introduce the main theoretical perspectives, debates, and themes in the field of international development since the mid-20th century. It has three sections. The first section focuses on debates over what conditions and strategies generate capitalist economic growth and on the relationship between capitalist growth, colonialism, enslavement, the construction of social difference, human welfare, and inequality. The second section presents critical assessments of development interventions from various perspectives. The third section considers the role of social movements in shaping development and social change in the 21st century.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This survey course examines the foreign influence on China’s political changes between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The topics include Chinese Christians and anti-dynastic revolutions, Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism, Chinese overseas and federalist movements, as well as global connections of Chinese communist movements between 1921 and 1949.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course aims to introduce you to key concepts, methods, and tools used in social science research. We begin with an overview of the logic of human inquiry and science, the link between theory and scientific research, and research ethics. Subsequently, we will delve into a few key elements of sociological research, including how to translate concepts into operational measures that are both reliable and valid. We will then cover the importance of sampling and sampling strategies. We will also introduce several modes of conducting empirical research, including experiments, qualitative field research, and survey research, giving attention to the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. You will learn how to conduct basic statistical analyses using secondary data towards the end of the semester. Throughout the course, we will cover important skills such as conducting literature reviews, designing research, and refining your ability to read and write social science research. The goal is to enhance your ability to critically assess social science research and to learn how to choose appropriate research methods for specific research questions.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research. Special Note: Required for IS GSCD track students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who are currently registered for or have completed any of the following courses may not register for AS.230.205: EN.553.111 OR EN.553.211 OR EN.553.230 OR EN.553.310 OR EN.553.311 OR EN.553.413 OR EN.553.420 OR EN.553.430 OR EN.560.435 OR EN.560.348 OR AS.280.345 OR AS.200.314 OR AS.230.394.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course will focus on four classical social theorists whose ideas have greatly influenced how we study and understand society: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and W.E.B. DuBois. Much of the course is devoted to applying their theories to analyze current social issues, especially those involving social inequality, conflict, cohesion, and change.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Objectives of this course are to achieve an understanding of the social context of disability from the population level to the individual disability experience. Topics will include social versus medical models of disability; the spectrum of ability; the history of disability; civil rights perspectives; life course and aging aspects of disability; and the role of the environment. Attention will be paid both to theoretical understandings of disability and the role of policies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the impacts of colonialism in East and Southeast Asia. Special attention will be paid to the social and economic development in British Singapore and Hong Kong as well as Japanese Korea and Taiwan. Topics include free-trade imperialism, colonial modernity, anticolonial movements, pan-Asianism, and post-war U.S. hegemony.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the social causes, impacts, and contexts of urban rebellions in the United States during the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on their relationship to social movements, urban social and demographic change, labor, economic decline, policing and imprisonment, and cultural and political change.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
The course examines the modern transformation of social life from the prism of coffee and tea. It traces the mass consumption of these two caffeinated beverages from the expansion of Eurocentric capitalism from the long sixteenth century onwards. It shows the changes in the coffee and tea culture from their respective Asian contexts to the age of mass consumption at the turn of the twentieth century. The topics include cash-crop production, plantation and peasant economy, the public sphere, and food heritage and nationalism.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Race has been important in social classifications and producing inequalities. This course is designed to provide you with a global understanding of how racial categories are created and maintained, how they change over time, and how they vary from place to place. It is organized in four parts. The first part introduces the concepts and analytical tools used by social scientists to study race. Of particular concern is power and the social construction rather than “natural” categories of race, as well as the general social processes involved in the maintenance and reproduction of these boundaries. In the second part, we will study the theories and dynamics racial category formation in the United States with attention to forms and processes of racial exclusion and oppression, and evidence of socio-economic inequalities based on race. In the third part of the course, we will compare these processes in the U.S. to those occurring in other countries. The fourth and final part of the course examines how race and racism shape political struggles and resistance movements.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Race and ethnicity have played a prominent role in American society and continue to do so, as demonstrated by interracial and interethnic gaps in economic and educational achievement, residence, political power, family structure, crime, and health. Using a sociological framework, we will explore the historical significance of race and its development as a social construction, assess the causes and consequences of intergroup inequalities and explore potential solutions.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Fake news. Alternative facts. Follow the science. Misinformation. Disinformation. How can we understand the role of information, evidence, and scientific inquiry in politics? Where does information come from? How is it used? How can evidence, argument, and listening improve public conversations? This seminar will examine the connections between information, knowledge, evidence, and democracy, focusing mostly on the United States but with global examples as well.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine various aspects of social inequality in China during the Mao and post-Mao eras, including inequality within villages, the rural/urban divide, labor relations, education and health policies, gender and ethnic relations, and the social foundations of elite groups. Each of these topics will be tackled analytically, but the goal is also to understand what it was and is like to live in China as the country has undergone radical social transformations over the past seven decades. The course is writing-intensive and will be conducted as a discussion seminar.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
While developments in biomedicine and health care have led to the eradication, cure and management of many human health problems, disease, illness and health have also been the focus for aggressive social controls and population management. The technologies and practices of disease control and health management have been foundational to some of the most aggressive structures of oppression in recent history such as the Jewish Ghetto, the Concentration Camp, the South African Township and techniques of segregation. This course seeks to explore how epidemics and disease control are linked to larger questions of power, state craft and international dynamics. This course asks how have outbreaks of infectious disease shaped social and political action? How do societies respond to outbreaks and why? What do epidemic moments tell us about global structures of power and the dynamics of control? Drawing on historical cases including plague during the European Renaissance and before, the HIV/AIDS Pandemic and the West African Ebola Outbreak of 2013-2016, this course will introduce students to the history and practices of disease control as well as important theoretical perspectives by which to understand the sociological and historical effects of disease and the responses to them. Students will engage sociological concepts such as biopolitics, social construction of disease and illness and biosecurity and produce a final research paper examining the outcomes and responses to an epidemic event to show mastery of the topics covered in the course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The education system plays an important and multi-faceted role in modern society. Schools socialize students, allocate rewards and status, promote national identities, train future workers, feed into the criminal justice system, and make some people a lot of money. Sometimes these roles work together and sometimes they are in direct conflict with one another. This course will provide a sociological perspective on the education system as a whole by examining the historical process of educational expansion, the role of formal education in society, and how the education system interacts with other social institutions, such as the courts and labor market.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Recent national conversations about racial segregation, inequality and the affordable housing crisis raise many important questions—this course focuses on several of these questions, through the lens of urban sociology and housing policy. There are three main areas we will focus on in the course: 1) Understanding the role of racial segregation, neighborhood and housing effects on children and family life; 2) Research methods for studying urban poverty and neighborhoods; and 3) Programs, policies and initiatives designed to house the poor, alleviate concentrated spatial poverty, and increase residential choice. We will primarily focus on issues related to urban poverty in large cities, comparing the patterns of residential mobility and neighborhood characteristics for white and Black Americans. We will utilize archival data, qualitative interviews, census data, and quasi/experimental data to gather evidence about neighborhoods, housing, and policies, as well as their impacts. We will also explore interactive online applications that facilitate the study of neighborhoods (e.g. American Community Survey, GIS with Social Explorer). A statistics/public policy background is helpful, but not required.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course surveys sociological theories and research on immigration to the U.S. Theoretical approaches include theories of international migration, economic sociology, immigration, and assimilation. Research topics include the impact of U.S. immigration laws and policies on immigrant inflows and stocks, self-selection of immigrants, the impact of immigration on the native-born population and the U.S. labor market and economy, and the adaptation of the first and second generations.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines the complex, at times conflicting, relationship that has emerged between Indian seats of power from above and Indian expressions of society from below. Attention will be placed on the period between 1947 to the present.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The field of medicine has been a key site where race has been constructed, deployed, and contested. Race and racism have played a crucial role in the development of medicine in the United States, from the medicalization of Blackness to different racialized health indicators. Through this course we will ask: How has the field of medicine constructed race? And how have race and racism been challenged within medicine? This is an upper-level, reading intensive seminar course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
What is the function and purpose of schooling in modern society? Is education the "great equalizer" in America, or does family background mostly predict where people end up in life? What can we do to improve educational attainment? This course is designed to tackle such questions and develop the ability of students to think critically, theoretically, historically and empirically about debates in the sociology of education. The course will also cover additional topics, including: racial and economic differences in educational attainment; school segregation; the rise of for-profit education; how college matters. In addition to reading empirical studies and theoretical work, the relevance of education research for policy-making will be emphasized throughout the course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course provides “hands on” research experience applying sociological research tools and a sociological perspective to problems of substance. Quantitative methods will be emphasized, including how to access publicly available survey data, data management, and the presentation of results. Each student will design and carry out a research project and write a research report. Juniors and seniors only. Sophomores require instructor's permission.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course provides "hands on" research experience applying sociological research tools and a sociological perspective to problems of substance. Qualitative observational and/or interviewing methods will be emphasized. Students will design and carry out a research project and write a research report. Introduction to Social Statistics (230.205) and Research Methods for the Social Sciences (230.202) are prerequisites. This course is restricted to Juniors and Seniors only. Instructor permission required for prerequisite exemptions for all students (majors and non-majors). Sophomores require instructor permission.
Prerequisite(s): AS.230.202 AND AS.230.205
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course provides "hands on" research experience in the field of global social change and development. The course fulfills the "research practicum" requirement for Sociology majors and is required for the GSCD track.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
What is the relationship between space and society? In this course, we will challenge the idea that space is a mere container of human interactions and activities. We will learn how top-down decisions about space (e.g., the dismantling of public housing, land dispossession, the formation of refugee camps) contribute to social hierarchies along class, gender, race, and caste lines. We will then consider how bottom-up movements use space to resist oppression and promote social change. We will draw on theoretical and empirical work from the social sciences and urban studies, and explore cases from several regions of the world, spanning the last few decades. Students in the course will also practice broader essential skills in the social sciences, including summarizing academic arguments, connecting empirical observations to theoretical debates, and making clear and concise arguments.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This is a hands-on interview methods class. As a class, we will select a topic of interest and a reading list related to that subject. The topic may be related to politics, social movements, and/or education. After learning interview techniques and IRB protocols, students will conduct semi-structured, 60-minute interviews with at least five respondents on the topic. We will read extensive background literature together, and then develop several over-arching research questions. We will design the semi-structured interview guide together, and every student will use the same guide. Next we will turn to data analysis. Students will learn how to use Dedoose, or a similar qualitative data analysis software program, to code the approximately 75 interviews conducted by the class. Each student will be responsible for reading through all data and code their own transcripts, using a code book the class develops together. The final assignment will be to write a journal-length paper on a subject of their choice, using whichever coded excerpts they wish to, but drawing on no fewer than 10-15 total transcripts.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
In this class, we will examine changes in family/household behaviors and relationships from a demographic perspective. We will investigate how culture, economics, and population characteristics can shape family structures, how the role of families has changed in recent decades, and how families are important in people’s lives. We will study diverse familial forms in the U.S. as well as those in the international context. We will study important (and measurable) events in people’s family lives, such as cohabitation, marriage, divorce, and childbearing. We will study how family roles are changing for fathers, mothers, and grandparents. We will also learn about the health implications of various familial relationships. We will use demographic tools and data to compare families across time periods, across social groups, and (to some extent) across countries. You will be doing your own quantitative analyses. You will develop your skills at interpreting and critiquing demographic data that researchers use to support their arguments about the family. You will also develop your skills at making your own accurate and compelling arguments using demographic data.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Humanitarian organizations play life-preserving roles in global conflicts, and have front-row views of disasters ranging from the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the 2011 Fukushima tsunami in Japan. Yet even while they provide vital assistance to millions of people in crisis, such organizations are beset by important paradoxes that hinder their capacity to create sustainable interventions. They work to fill long-lasting needs, but are prone to moving quickly from one site to the next in search of the latest emergency. They strive to be apolitical, yet are invariably influenced by the geopolitical agendas of global powers. How do such contradictions arise, and what is their impact upon millions of aid recipients around the world? Drawing on case studies from South Sudan to Haiti, this course addresses these contradictions by exploring how and why medical aid organizations attempt, and sometimes fail, to reconcile short-term goals, such as immediate life-saving, with long-term missions, such as public health programs and conflict resolution initiatives.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will compare the current global crisis with previous major crises of historical capitalism through a combination of theoretical and historical readings. Throughout, we will ask: What can a study of past crises tell us about the nature and future trajectory of the current global crisis? We will be particularly concerned to understand the ways in which social, economic and geopolitical crises intertwined, as well as the differential social and geopolitical impact of the crises. Which social classes bore the brunt of the disruptions in economic activity in each crisis? Which geographical areas or geopolitical groupings lost out (or benefited) from the crisis? What kinds of movements of protest emerged and how did they affect the trajectory of the crises? How have environmental and ecological challenges resurfaced in each crisis including today?
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Social Reproduction is a critical theme in contemporary sociology. In our daily lives, social reproduction includes activities such as caring for children and elderly, performing household work, caring for the sick family members, schooling for children, to name a few. In other words, social reproduction refers to a wide range of activities that reproduce society and its members on a daily basis and generationally. Gendered division of labor is central to understanding institutions and social units through which social reproduction is managed in societies. For instance, women in general tend to do a lot more of unpaid ‘reproductive labor’ in households and communities. The course will focus on developing countries, which are incorporated into global capitalism differentially and unequally, to understand how capitalist relations shape the practices of social reproduction for various societies in the global south. The idea of ‘reproduction’ as separate from ‘production’ is specific to the history of capitalism. Therefore, by examining ‘social reproduction’ in context of developing world, the course will also offer a critical reading of expansion of capitalism itself, since it will engage with how marketization breaks down traditional ties, institutions, and networks that are instrumental for survival of communities outside the developed world. In short, this course will introduce students to theories of social reproduction and engage with ongoing sociological writings on the topic with a focus on developing world. By the end of this course, students should be familiar with key theories of social reproduction and be able to critically examine them in context of contemporary capitalism. Some specific themes that will be covered in the course include childcare, medical care, old age care, surrogacy, household work, schooling, mental health, and climate change.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The right to freedom from slavery. The right to movement. The right to healthcare. These rights, as described in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are typically pitched as a universal good. But are they truly universal? Or do human rights discourses reflect a particular set of priorities and values, articulated in particular times and places? This course will address this question by exploring both current debates surrounding human rights, and the real-life challenges that activists face in putting them into practice. However powerful they may sound on paper, how binding are human rights treaties in the public sphere? How can human rights advocacy prompt governments to protect women, refugees, and sexual and gender minorities? Secondly, do understandings of justice in the Global South ever differ from those articulated in the 1948 Declaration? Finally, do human rights discourses embrace all kinds of rights equally? For example, why have human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch historically prioritized civil and political rights, like freedom of religion, over economic rights, like the right to healthcare? And more broadly, what can human rights advocacy do in the global fight against capitalist exploitation? The emancipatory rhetoric of human rights, critics worry, cannot itself undo the grim realities of global inequality. In an unequal world, could human rights organizations compel corporations to pay livable wages to their employees? Or obligate governments to provide healthcare to their citizens? Drawing on global case studies ranging from pro-refugee activists along the Greece-Turkey border to anti-FGC (female genital cutting) activism in the Gambia, this course aims to provide students with the tools to think critically about rights as a vehicle for social change.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to core concepts that define the sociological approach to health, illness and health care. Topics include: health disparities, social context of health and illness, and the Sociology of Medicine.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the dynamics of transformative social change in Latin America and the Caribbean through analyses of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Because revolutionary change is at once the most transformative and the most rare, this course will cover the exemplary cases of the Haitian, Mexican, and Cuban revolutions, but then also ask how theorists have understood the dynamics of both open rebellion and of everyday resistance in societies deeply structured by racial, gender, and class power, situated within an unequal world system. Attending to both local and global dynamics, this course will ask how Latin American dynamics have both conformed to and challenged universalist theories of social change.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will focus on the social dimensions of climate change. Drawing on global and multi-disciplinary scholarship, we will address such issues as: the relationship between fossil fuels and capitalism; the relationship between social inequality and “vulnerability” to climate change; and the political economy of “adaptation.” The longest section of the course will be devoted to understanding the social and political dimensions of proposed solutions to climate change, including renewable energy transitions, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and geoengineering. Students will write a final research paper on a sociological aspect of climate change.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the relationship between China and its migrants and their descendants from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It highlights the transnational foundation of modern Chinese nationalism. It also compares the divergent formations of the “Chinese question” in North America and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Key concepts include transnationalism, diaspora, ethnic politics, racism, Orientalism, and “united front” work.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not have completed AS.230.217 previously.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines how American cities have evolved since the United States ratified the radically new vision of race promoted by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. We will study the changing geography of race and class in American cities and their surrounding suburbs and what that evolution has meant for inequality. We will also consider how this shifting geography of race and class affects current debates in metropolitan policies like gentrification and tax policy. We will look to the future to examine what issues might come about in the coming decades and how we might avoid similar problems to those in history.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Race, class and gender are among key factors in systematic patterns of inequality in the United States (and globally). In this course, we examine the manner in which social inequality comes about and is maintained through a range of social institutions and daily social interactions. This class will examine how social institutions and daily social interactions structure the decisions individuals make and, in turn, how the decisions that individuals make serve to perpetuate or challenge existing social institutions and interactions. We will explore how the intersection of different forms of inequality, for example race and class or class and gender challenge traditional conceptions of inequality and provide insight into the processes that perpetuate inequality. We will use these sociological tools to develop what sociologist C. Wright Mills calls the "sociological imagination" and apply this imagination to contemporary debates in American society. We will discuss how the sociological imagination differs from the approach other disciplines in social science might take to study inequality.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course examines how the psy disciplines – psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and related fields – create knowledge about the mind, and how these fields have in turn shaped political and social life since early 20th century. We will explore how the psy disciplines have proven useful to projects of state building by reconstructing the human mind as a calculable, quantifiable entity, one that can be measured and governed across diverse educational, military, and healthcare settings. We will then ask how psychiatric categories such as bipolar disorder and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) were created, and consider their impact on both the legal/medical management of illness and on lay and expert notions of sanity and normality. Finally, we will examine the rising influence of humanitarian mental health interventions, and immerse ourselves in the debates they have engendered concerning the use of psychotherapy to alleviate suffering in war and disaster zones.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
How does public opinion shape electoral behavior and the contours of democracy in the United States, and how have these relationships changed as techniques for measuring public opinion have evolved since the early twentieth century? To consider this question, the course introduces alternative perspectives on the features of a healthy democracy, including both historical perspectives and current arguments. Interweaved with this material, the course examines how public opinion is measured and interpreted by private pollsters, survey researchers, and data journalists. Emphasis is placed on the alternative claims that opposing analysts adopt, as well as how the technologies of data collection and analysis shape the permissibility of conclusions. Students will learn to interpret public opinion patterns, which requires a brief presentation of basic concepts from survey sampling, including what to make of the polling industry’s most boring concept: margin of error.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.230.224 OR AS.001.127 are not eligible to take AS.230.365.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Today, Islamic finance is a global industry comprising nearly $3 trillion in assets, with hubs from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai to London. But half a century ago, nothing called “Islamic finance” existed. So where did Islamic finance come from? Why is it growing so fast? And what does it mean for finance to be Islamic? We discuss the ban on usury in Islam and other religious and philosophical traditions, finance in early and medieval Islamic societies, petrodollars and the birth of Islamic banking in the 1970s, the rise of Islamic capital markets since 2000, contemporary shariah-compliant financial structures, and the constitution of piety through financial practice.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course introduces two approaches in the research of economic sociology: the emphasis on macro world-historical social change and the concern over the meso-level institutionalization of markets. Key concepts include division of labor, market, commodification, social and cultural capital, informal economy, migrants and business networks, globalization, and post-globalization.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the role of housing, or the absence thereof, in shaping quality of life. It will explore the consequences of the places in which we live and how we are housed. Consideration will be given to overcrowding, affordability, accessibility, and past and existing housing policies and their influence on society. Special attention will be given to the problem of homelessness.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not have previously taken AS.230.223.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Diverging from conventional courses on international development that often center around the golden age of development (1950s-1970s), this course shifts the focus towards the subsequent era—the age of neoliberal globalization, its promises and discontent, and its potential alternatives. Over the last four decades or so, the new global trends of deepening marketization, globalized supply chains, freer trans-border flow of capital, and technological progress have posed new challenges as well as opportunities to developing countries. This course will provide an upper-level undergraduate introduction to the studies and practices of international development in the age of globalization.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the complex interplay between race, class, and the politics of decolonization and national independence in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and Latin America. Through diverse theories, primary sources, and comparative case studies, students will analyze how racialized and exploited groups have challenged systems of imperial and colonial domination while seeking to assert different meanings of freedom. The course moves beyond traditional decolonization narratives that restrict frameworks spatially to the boundaries of the nation-state and temporally to the post-World War II period. By historicizing decolonization struggles and emphasizing the transnational and comparative dimensions of the ideologies and practices of decolonization, we will explore how race and class dynamics within countries intersect with global power relations to shape the politics and processes of decolonization.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The seminar involves discussions (including with visiting authors) of readings related to the Arrighi Center’s four thematic priorities: (1) Continuity and Change in the Dynamics of Global Capitalism; (2) Changing Structures and Norms of Global Governance; (3) Global Inequality and Development; and (4) Land, Labor and Environmental Rights and Struggles. Participants include faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate) from a wide range of social science and humanities departments as well as visiting scholars from around the world. Undergraduates signing up under 230.375 will participate in both the main seminar with faculty and graduate students, followed by a special discussion session for undergraduates.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.675 are not eligible to take AS.230.375.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
How can we develop ways of linking all the different elements of today’s “polycrisis” into a strong account of the contemporary world? One way might be to study what makes profit for capitalism – and what doesn’t. The Spring 2025 Arrighi General Seminar is titled “Value, Price and Profit in the Contemporary World System.” It explores the bridges between Marx’s theory of value and contemporary politics. We’ll begin by reading from Marx himself, then move on to a variety of contemporary case studies that link the dynamics of capitalist profitability to commodity speculation, the development of AI, the green transition, and the rise of right-wing populism. The final section of the course will feature in-person visits from alumni of the Arrighi Center seminars, who are doing cutting-edge research on political economy. Participants in the Arrighi’s Center’s weekly general seminar include faculty and students from a wide range of social science and humanities departments and programs. Undergraduates signing up under 230.376 will participate in both the main General Seminar with faculty and graduate students, followed by a special discussion section for undergraduates.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
What is a refugee? Since World War II, states that have pledged to offer protection to refugees have frequently been drawn instead to the dictates of nationalism and communitarianism, which prioritize concern for their own citizens, rather than to the needs of forced migrants. As a result, even those migrants that have been formally recognized as refugees according to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention have not been assured of protection, and other migrants have been even less assured. In this course, we will locate the reasons for this reality in the legal, political, and historical underpinnings of political asylum. What is the difference between an asylum seeker and a refugee? How has the refugee category been redefined and contested by international bodies since 1951? How are the ambiguities of real-life violence and persecution simplified in asylum adjudication interviews that require clear, factual narratives? What kinds of protections are offered to asylum seekers, whether by UN bodies, NGOs, or host governments, and how have such protections varied geographically and historically? Finally, what protections, if any, are afforded to those migrants who are fleeing not persecution but rather “merely” endemic poverty or climate-induced displacement? The course draws on literature from sociology, history, anthropology, and international refugee law in order to understand the capacity (or lack thereof) of human rights discourses and declarations to contravene state sovereignty in the name of protecting the rightless.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
After examining alternative explanations for why individuals obtain different amounts and types of educational training, the course focuses on how an individual’s family background and race affect his or her trajectory through the educational system. The course covers the specific challenges that have confronted urban schooling in America since the 1960s, including the classic literature on the effects of school and community resources on student achievement as well as the development and later evaluation of school desegregation policies. The course also considers case studies of current policy debates in the US, such as housing segregation and school resegregation, voucher programs for school choice, and the motivation for and consequences of the establishment of state-mandated testing requirements. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed upon the alternative modes of inquiry and writing which opposing scholars, policymakers, and journalists use to address these contentious topics.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Focusing on the race-makings of the Asians across the Pacific in the long twentieth century, the course employs the reading materials that elucidate the constructions about the demographic categories of the Asian "races." We use prewar Japanese materials and Chinese nationalist thoughts to elaborate on the following themes: the internal distinction among the peoples grouped under the racial category of the Asians; the overall presentation about the generic category of the "Asian" peoplehood, as well as their alleged shared civilization and interests. The theoretical framework include concepts of capitalist reconfiguration of social boundaries through racism and the question of power behind the reproduction of racial hierarchy.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce students to the cutting-edge debates on global migration and refugees and give them a first-hand look at the complicated interactions between research, politics, and policy-making. Each week, students will read the work of a featured scholar who will visit the class as a guest lecture, giving students the unique opportunity to directly engage with the scholar. In addition, policy makers, community groups, and activists dealing with migration will visit the class for guest lectures, and students will have the opportunity to learn exactly how, when, and why research is (and is not) applied on the ground. To highlight the global nature of the theme, the course will highlight issues of immigration and emigration, receiving and sending countries, in the global North and South. This course is offered in Washington DC and is available to students accepted to the Spring 2025 Hopkins Semester DC only.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
We are generally told that you can't put a price on life or a price on our health but lives are quantified, valued and priced every day. In this class we will explore the ways in which life is valued in the modern world, its effects and the outcomes from it. We will also examine how forms of quantification and valuation have been employed to dehumanize and subjugate peoples, especially those racialized as different. Beginning with an exploration of human pricing during the trans-Atlantic Slave trade and continuing through to contemporary health care and health insurance practices, this course will examine how we value (monetarily) human existence in modernity. This course will introduce students to ideas emerging out of the Black Marxist Tradition, postcolonial thought, and critical feminist approaches to historical research. From the examination of insurance under slavery to the use of race corrections in medical algorithms, this class will confront students with the question- "how can we put a price on life?" and most importantly "Should we?".
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Is access to healthcare a fundamental human right? If so, then which global actors are obligated to provide healthcare to whom, and for how long? How do meanings of health and illness vary across time and place? And finally, how are human rights principles translated into frontline practice in order to promote well-being? This course takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to these questions through a series of global case studies ranging from humanitarian aid in post-tsunami Sri Lanka to anti-FGM (female genital mutilation) campaigns in Ghana. How do international NGOs, UN bodies, and governments collaborate (or compete) to distribute healthcare in places beset by dire resource shortages? Do human rights principles carry legal weight across borders, and if so, could access to healthcare services and essential medicines be litigated in order to compel governments to provide it? And finally, what cultural assumptions do human rights discourses carry with them, and what happens if rights-based approaches are poorly received by recipient populations? Moving beyond the basic principle of healthcare as a human right, this course aims to bring this idea’s history and politics into focus by offering an in-depth exploration of its ethics and implementation.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research.
Prerequisite(s): Students who are currently registered for or have completed any of the following courses may not register for AS.230.394: EN.553.111 OR EN.553.211 OR EN.553.230 OR EN.553.310 OR EN.553.311 OR EN.553.413 OR EN.553.420 OR EN.553.430 OR EN.560.435 OR EN.560.348 OR AS.280.345 OR AS.200.314 OR AS.230.205
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What is the structure of society, how does it change, and how is it reproduced? What is the relation between social structures and our ideas about them? What are the conditions of possibility for human freedom? This course will examine how social theorists have advanced novel answers to these questions as they grappled with the historical events and social concerns of the 20th and 21st centuries. This semester there will be a particular focus on the social theories of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser and Stuart Hall. In addition to understanding and comparing theories, we will assess their usefulness for understanding our present conjuncture with a particular emphasis on right-wing extremism and the relationship between racism and capitalism.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This seminar surveys key problems of political sociology including the rise of the modern state, the origins and nature of liberal democracy, sources of authority, the relationship between political and economic power, the nation-state and nationalism, states and war, ideology and political contention, collective identity, social movements, and social revolutions. Fulfills Comparative Politics for International Studies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
In the United States, we spend more than $100 billion annually on illegal drugs—and the government spends more than $50 billion a year to combat their sale and use. These statistics raise important and complicated social questions. This course will examine the production, sale, use, and control of illegal drugs from a historical and sociological perspective. We will have three objectives: to understand the social construction of drug use and illegality in the United States and other rich countries; to uncover the political and economic consequences of drug trafficking in those countries that produce drugs, particularly in Latin America; and to examine the political economy of drug control through the so-called War on Drugs, both domestically and internationally.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Neoliberalism, a political project that seeks to subject all aspects of social life to free market force, has ascended to orthodoxy in developed and developing countries alike over the last four decades. This course is a reading seminar focused on some of the key classic and cutting-edge original texts that critically examine and debate the origins, socio-political impacts, and crisis of the neoliberal project. It will cover such topics as the genealogy of the neoliberal idea, neoliberal state, informalization of works, neoliberal cities, rise of the one percent, and global governance. Class will be a mix of lecture and seminar-style discussions. Requirements include reading memo, class presentation, and a term paper.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
In this course we will examine contemporary Chinese society, looking at economic development, rural transformation, urbanization and migration, labor relations, changes in class structure and family organization, health care, environmental problems, governance, and popular protest. The course is designed for both graduate and undergraduate students. Undergraduates must have already completed a course about China at Hopkins. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course is designed as a basic graduate level introduction to social demography, but will be open to advanced undergrad students. Sociology, as well as other social science disciplines, will be employed to facilitate the understanding of the interaction between social and demographic forces. We start with an introduction to basic concepts and data issues in demography. We then cover the study of three basic population processes: fertility, mortality and migration. Other selected topics include family demography, population composition and structure, population aging, and the intersection among population, policy, environment and economic development.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course provides theoretical and historical approaches to examining the centrality of racism, imperialism, and colonialism to the origins and ongoing functioning of capitalism and the global political economy. We begin with the dominant theoretical frameworks used to study capitalism and carefully juxtapose these with theory and empirical analyses foregrounding capitalism’s connections to racial slavery/racialized labor exploitation, imperialism, colonialism, and gendered exploitation. Following this, we examine the unfolding of capitalism in the post-emancipation, post-independence, and neoliberal periods, paying close attention to inequalities produced within and between nations. We end by examining resistance to racial capitalism, as well as imagining alternative futures.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Can social democracy offer an alternative to neoliberal capitalism? This course begins with an investigation of the history of social democracy in Europe, from origins to crisis to reconstruction, and then globalizes this in three ways: first, by asking how colonial relations affected social democracy in Europe; second, by examining welfare states in Asia, Latin America, and Africa; and third, by considering the possibilities of global redistribution.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.619 are not eligible to take AS.230.419.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
The Sociology Department Colloquium is a speaker series that is required for all first- and second-year Sociology graduate students and faculty and is open to interested undergraduate sociology majors. The Colloquium takes place once a month and lunch is provided. For those interested in taking it for credit (graded P/F), in-person attendance is required.
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Students will read and discuss classical and contemporary works in the world-systems tradition, with a focus on theories of historical capitalism, global inequality, systemic crises, current social and ecological contradictions and limits, and possible alternative future trajectories.
Prerequisite(s): AS.230.213 or permission of the instructor.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
The rapid expansion of digitized data about human behavior has revolutionized social science research. These days companies and governments are creating and collecting data on just about everything we do. We can now observe behavior on a scale and with a level of detail never before imaginable. We can ask questions of whole populations that previously required expensive and time-consuming surveys. In order to take advantage of these new opportunities we need change the way we think about research ethics, study design, statistical inference, and the logic of inquiry. This course provides an introduction to these new approaches as well as a discussion of their risks and limitations. The focus will be on sociological logic of inquiry and how to answer questions about the social world. Coding experience will be helpful, but is not required.
Prerequisite(s): Students may only receive credit for AS.230.418 or AS.230.618.;AS.230.205 OR AS.280.345
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Policing has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities, and has been a site of resistance and freedom struggles since the first Reconstruction. In this undergraduate seminar, we will survey key debates around policing and social movements, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which policing “makes race” and how debates about crime, surveillance, and safety were often debates about black inclusion and equality. We will explore changes in the racial logics of policing over time, debates over how policing helped construct the racial order, and the consequences of several shifts in policing for communities. From broken windows policing in New York to the emergence of the new vagrancy-style banishment laws in urban Seattle to the men who live under constant surveillance in Philadelphia and to the large share of blacks in Ferguson with outstanding warrants for ‘failure to appear”, these policies and policing regimes have helped remake the government in the eyes of the urban poor. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, racial lifeworlds, and community social capital? The course will include a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative).
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the social construction and consequences of gender, covering such topics as work, care, sexuality, identity, politics and inequality. Readings will include the classics as well as newer works in the field. We will equip students with tools not just to add women and stir, but to take up the challenge of the sociology of gender and apply its deconstructive, profoundly egalitarian, critical perspectives to the practice of sociology writ large. The first half of the class addresses major theories of gender, while the second half considers particular sites or topics of particularly contemporary relevance. Throughout, in keeping with the theme of the course and of the sociology of gender generally, weak destabilize the white, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, etc. perspective with considerations of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, trans and queer social categories. Thanks in part to the profound insights of sociologists of gender, we know that no position is without its positionality, and we will continually invoke comparative work to illuminate the way this works to constrain and shape our vision.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.631 are not eligible to take AS.230.431.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This seminar examines inter-regional connections and diplomacy in maritime Asia (focusing on the region around the Straits of Malacca, the South and East China Seas, and the Taiwan Straits). In addition to a survey of the application of world-system theories on Asia, the reading materials include the roles of trading diasporas in world history, the maritime silk Road, the Chinese tribute trade system, the British free-trade imperialism, American open-door policy, Japanese pan-Asianism, Cold-war diplomacy, and the Beijing-centric belt-and-road initiatives. The goal is to explore the prospects and limitations of examining inter-Asian connections beyond political states.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This seminar tackles major issues in the classical and contemporary sociology of religion. We begin with Ibn Khaldun, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Mary Douglas, asking basic questions: What are religion and the sacred? Why do they exist? What is the relationship between religion and social structure? And what role does religion play in morality, solidarity, boundaries, exploitation, patriarchy, and macrohistorical transformations such as the rise of capitalism? Keeping this theoretical grounding (and its flaws and biases) in mind, we continue to probe the problem of religion in modernity through more-recent writings. Topics include the secularization debate (Are modernity and religion antithetical?); “religious markets” and rational-choice theories of religion; religious revivalism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and proselytizing movements; feminist and queer sociologies of religion; civil religion (Is standing for the national anthem a religious act?); embodiment and prayer; Orientalism and postcolonial interrogations of the secular; religious violence and nationalism; the intersectionality of religion with race, class, and caste; and religion and neoliberalism. Although dominant sociologies of religion have focused on Christianity in Western Europe and North America, this course applies a global lens, training significant focus on non-Western and non-Christian contexts.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This is an intensive reading seminar on working class formation from a comparative, historical and global perspective, including theoretical and empirical (case study) readings on changes over time in labor process, labor markets, and labor movements. We will build on a range of local case studies to establish spatial and temporal patterns, and discuss the connections between these global patterns and the dynamics of historical capitalism.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course enables the student to pursue individual investigation and reading in a field of special interest, under the direct supervision of a member of the Sociology faculty, which results in a substantive paper or report containing significant analysis and interpretation of the topic.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course enables a student to work directly with a member of the Sociology faculty as a research assistant on an existing research project. Scholarly research is work that involves scientific process/method, i.e. the collection of and analysis of data appropriate to the research problem.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This enables a student to craft a research-oriented internship that addresses an issue of sociological interest, under the direct supervision of a member of the Sociology faculty. This must conclude with a written reflection or presentation on the student’s experience and its relevance to sociology.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This seminar is a workshop for Sociology majors writing senior honor theses. It is part of the two-semester Senior Honors Program. Students must complete an application to enroll in the Honors Program [https://soc.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2021/04/Sociology-Honors-ThesisApplication.pdf] before registering for this seminar. Typically, students first take the seminar and then enroll for the Honors Independent Study (230.512) with their thesis advisor in the second semester of the Program. The seminar is designed to assist students in the early phase of their honors thesis research and to provide a community of peers who are writing theses.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course is the second semester of the Honors Program. Students register for this course with their thesis advisor to receive a letter grade for their solo-authored thesis. See handbook for details.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.;AS.230.511
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course enables a student to craft a research-oriented internship that addresses an issue of sociological interest, under the direct supervision of a member of the Sociology faculty. This must conclude with a written reflection or presentation on the student’s experience and its relevance to sociology.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will focus on four classical theorists whose ideas have greatly influenced how we study and understand society: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and W.E.B. DuBois. The course is devoted to understanding, comparing and critiquing how each theorist understood the origin, structure and historical dynamics of modern societies.
This course will examine how important schools of social theory challenged and reconstructed the “classical” theories of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim as they grappled with the historical developments and social concerns of the 20th century.
This course provides an accessible but in-depth coverage of multiple regression with a focus on sociological problems and software applications. We begin with the basics of linear regression, including estimation, statistical inference, and model assumptions. We then review several tools for diagnosing violations of statistical assumptions and what to do when things go wrong, including dealing with outliers, missing data, omitted variables, and weights. Graduate students should have completed AS.230.600 or equivalent. Undergraduates admitted with instructor's permission and AS.230.205 or equivalent.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
This course introduces categorical data analysis and multilevel analysis methods. The goals are applications of the methods to social science research. The classes will provide an intuitive understanding of the basics of categorical and multilevel data analysis including probability distributions, model assumptions, estimators, model checking, and model inference, followed by intensive instruction using empirical data analysis, Stata code, and substantive interpretations. The first seven weeks cover binary, count, and multiple-category dependent variables (logit, probit, Poisson, negative binomial, loglinear, multinomial logit, ordered logit, and conditional logit). The 8th week is devoted to multiple imputation. The last five weeks cover latent class analysis from sample-based cluster analysis to model-based cluster analysis. The statistical software is Stata18 and R.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Individual one-hour presentations by faculty members will introduce students to the faculty’s substantive interests and research styles.
In this seminar we will read key texts in comparative sociology. The topics covered are cross-national sociology, comparative national development, comparing world-systems, the modern world-system, globalization, and social movements.
In the past few years, social inequality in America has become front and center in public and policy debates, especially concerns about poverty, racial segregation, housing, educational attainment and unemployment. This course will: examine what we know and what we can perhaps learn about the causes and consequences of inequality; explore what the sociological perspective has to add to the study of inequality; familiarize students with some of the key policy choices that affect the distribution of income and well-being in the U.S.
This advanced social statistics course introduces students to a broad range of models for panel data analysis. Students have an opportunity to focus on one model that is most appropriate to their independent research.
The rapid expansion of digitized data about human behavior has revolutionized social science research. These days companies and governments are creating and collecting data on just about everything we do. We can now observe behavior on a scale and with a level of detail never before imaginable. We can ask questions of whole populations that previously required expensive and time-consuming surveys. In order to take advantage of these new opportunities we need change the way we think about research ethics, study design, statistical inference, and the logic of inquiry. This course provides an introduction to these new approaches as well as a discussion of their risks and limitations. The focus will be on sociological logic of inquiry and how to answer questions about the social world. Coding experience will be helpful, but is not required. Recommended Course Background: AS.230.604 - Linear Models
Prerequisite(s): Students may only receive credit for AS.230.418 or AS.230.618.;AS.230.600
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Can social democracy offer an alternative to neoliberal capitalism? This course begins with an investigation of the history of social democracy in Europe, from origins to crisis to reconstruction, and then globalizes this in three ways: first, by asking how colonial relations affected social democracy in Europe; second, by examining welfare states in Asia, Latin America, and Africa; and third, by considering the possibilities of global redistribution.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course considers the sociological forces that shape modern metropolitan inequality. We will investigate the social and spatial patterns of inequality and how sociologists analyze patterns of inequality. As part of this inquiry, we will consider how sociologists (and related disciplines) use different methods to investigate topics of study. We will also consider how multiple levels of social action, from individual decisions to global political-economic relationships, affect the lives of residents in metropolitan areas.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
What is the function and purpose of education in modern society? Is college the "great equalizer" in America, or does education further stratify people by family background? What can we do to improve educational attainment? Where does work and career preparation fit in? This course is designed to tackle such questions and develop the ability of students to think critically, theoretically, historically and empirically about debates in the sociology of education and education policy.
This course will explore the social construction and consequences of gender, covering such topics as work, care, sexuality, identity, politics and inequality. Readings will include the classics as well as newer works in the field. We will equip students with tools not just to add women and stir, but to take up the challenge of the sociology of gender and apply its deconstructive, profoundly egalitarian, critical perspectives to the practice of sociology writ large. The first half of the class addresses major theories of gender, while the second half considers particular sites or topics of particularly contemporary relevance. Throughout, in keeping with the theme of the course and of the sociology of gender generally, weak destabilize the white, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, etc. perspective with considerations of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, trans and queer social categories. Thanks in part to the profound insights of sociologists of gender, we know that no position is without its positionality, and we will continually invoke comparative work to illuminate the way this works to constrain and shape our vision.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.431 are not eligible to take AS.230.631.
In the past few years, social inequality in America has become front and center in public and policy debates, especially concerns about poverty, racial segregation, housing, educational attainment and unemployment. This course will focus on evaluating evidence on the effectiveness of social policies aimed at reducing barriers to inequality and promoting social mobility in these key domains. Students will become familiar with quantitative, experimental and mixed methods research approaches to understanding how well social policies and interventions actually achieve their intended goals. The course will consider background research on social inequality as it informs policy interventions, policy and evaluation design elements, causal inference and discussion of intervention implementation.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Course Goals1. To survey the literature in the sociology of culture, with an emphasis on current approachesto culture2. To stimulate ideas for empirical work in cultural sociology3. To offer cultural tools for application to empirical research in social science and beyond
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken Sociology of Culture - AS.230.659 - are not eligible to take AS.230.639.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An intensive analysis of a wide range of sociological studies, designed to acquaint the student with how sociologists deal with important theoretical issues, using a variety of methods and sources of data. Particular attention will be paid to the logical coherence of the studies and to the fit between data and interpretation.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore questions related to historical and contemporary trajectories of agrarian change. It begins with classical theoretical debates on the distinctiveness of peasantries and their prospects under capitalism. It will then turn to major themes of agrarian change in the twentieth and twenty-first century: agrarian transitions to capitalism, agrarian transitions to and from socialism, peasant revolutions, moral economies and everyday resistance, rural industrialization, land grabbing, gender, globalization and climate change. The course will be structured as a reading-intensive seminar.
The course examines methods of studying long-term, large-scale social change. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are covered.
This seminar surveys key problems of political sociology including the rise of the modern state, the relationship between political and economic power, the origins and nature of liberal democracy, the nation-state and nationalism, states and war, sources of authority, identity and political contention, social movements, and social revolutions. This is a graduate level class that will meet together with “Politics and Society”, an advanced undergraduate class.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This hands-on qualitative-methods course aims to turn the graduate student into a skilled, systematic, and confident fieldworker. Emphasis is on ethnographic observation (including participant observation) and interviewing. We will learn primarily by doing and secondarily by discussing and reading.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore the ways that social theorists have thought about time, temporality, and historical change. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and revisiting classic texts as well as more recent scholarship, this course is open to PhD students in both humanities and social sciences. Readings may include, among others, Marx, Du Bois, Benjamin, Bloch, Hunt, Koselleck, Scott, Anderson, Adam, Postone, Steinmetz, Sewell, etc.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a graduate-level course in participant observation. Participant observation is qualitative field research conducted in the time and place of “subjects” rather than the observer. In this class, we will learn by doing. Students will pick a local field site within the first week of the course (and should thus enter the semester with a firm idea or two). They will then conduct participant observation at least twice a week every week for twelve weeks. Seminars will be devoted to presenting preliminary findings, commenting on each other’s field notes and discussing issues that arise in the field. Reading will be minimal, and largely practical and ethical in nature. Students will write a mid-semester literature review and produce a final paper based on their findings.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will introduce graduate students to the field of global and transnational sociology, surveying different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of global and transnational processes. Topics can include global institutions and governance structures; international political economy and global value chains; imperial/colonial and anti-imperial knowledge production; immigrant and diasporic experiences; and transnational social movements, among others.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The seminar involves discussions (including with visiting authors) of readings related to the Arrighi Center’s four thematic priorities: (1) Continuity and Change in the Dynamics of Global Capitalism; (2) Changing Structures and Norms of Global Governance; (3) Global Inequality and Development; and (4) Land, Labor and Environmental Rights and Struggles. Participants include faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate) from a wide range of social science and humanities departments as well as visiting scholars from around the world. Undergraduates signing up under 230.375 will participate in both the main seminar with faculty and graduate students, followed by a special discussion session for undergraduates.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.375 are not eligible to take AS.230.675.
How can we develop ways of linking all the different elements of today’s “polycrisis” into a strong account of the contemporary world? One way might be to study what makes profit for capitalism – and what doesn’t. The Spring 2025 Arrighi General Seminar is titled “Value, Price and Profit in the Contemporary World System.” It explores the bridges between Marx’s theory of value and contemporary politics. We’ll begin by reading from Marx himself, then move on to a variety of contemporary case studies that link the dynamics of capitalist profitability to commodity speculation, the development of AI, the green transition, and the rise of right-wing populism. The final section of the course will feature in-person visits from alumni of the Arrighi Center seminars, who are doing cutting-edge research on political economy. Graduate students from a wide range of social science and humanities departments participate in the Arrighi Center general seminar for academic credit or as auditors.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar includes all members of the second year cohort of sociology graduate students. Class meetings will provide feedback and guidance as students develop proposals for their Trial Research Papers. The course will also include a series of professional developments seminars. For Sociology PhD students only.
This seminar includes all members of the third year cohort of sociology graduate students. Class meetings will provide feedback and guidance as students revise the final drafts of their Trial Research Papers. For Sociology PhD students only.
This course enables the student to pursue individual investigation and reading in a field of specialinterest, under the direct supervision of a member of the Sociology faculty, which results in asubstantive paper or report containing significant analysis and interpretation of the topic.
Research assistants may register for this course. See handbook for details.
Students working on dissertation research may register for this course. See handbook for details.
Students working as a Research Apprentice should register for this course. Full-time sociology faculty may sponsor research apprenticeships. See handbook for details.
Students who are completing their dissertation fellowship semester should register for this course. See handbook for details.
Teaching assistants are required to register for this course. See handbook for details.
Students should register for this course during their first semester working on their Trial Research Paper. See handbook for details.
Students should register for this course during their second semester working on their Trial Research Paper. See handbook for details.
Students should register for this course during their third semester working on their Trial Research Paper. See handbook for details.
Students conducting summer research may register for this course. See handbook for details.
Cross Listed Courses
Center for Africana Studies
What is Anti-Racism? How do we identify racism’s presence and effects, and how do we direct social and civic resources to end it? In this Freshman Seminar, students will learn from a series of faculty experts and invited guests about the history, workings, and legacies of racism. They’ll also study present-day and past approaches – attempted and theorized – to abolish racism in the modern world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This introductory course will examine policing and prisons in the United States and beyond, with a focus on racial inequality. It will consist of three parts. First, we will define key concepts in police and prison studies. Then, we will explore the contemporary state of prisons and policing in the United States and look at debates around the rise of “mass incarceration” and aggressive forms of policing in the final third of the 20th century. Third, we will explore policing and prison in other parts of the globe in the contemporary moment, highlighting similarities and differences from the U.S. case. What can studying the instruments of social control in other societies reveal about our own? Students will develop an understanding of major trends, keywords, and debates in the literature on policing and prisons, with particular reference to race and racism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course explores Black social movements in the United States to better understand social inequality, social structures, oppression, agency, and power across time and space.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course will examine the confrontation of Black social movements with imperialism in the twentieth century. How, we will ask, have key Black internationalist thinkers conceptualized and defined diaspora, capitalism, imperialism, war, and the global? What have been the effects of war and repression, as well as economic growth and globalization, on Black internationalism? Readings may include texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Frantz Fanon, Ashley Farmer, Claudia Jones, Robin D.G. Kelley, Claude McKay, Huey P. Newton, Walter Rodney, Malcolm X, etc. Students will complete a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to Black internationalism in the twentieth century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
What can we learn about mass incarceration, and social life in the USA more broadly, when we listen to incarcerated people themselves? This course centers the voices, experiences, and expertise of the incarcerated and will combine scholarly readings on life inside prisons with a range of writings by incarcerated people. Topics of discussion may include censorship, rehabilitation, Covid-19, solitary confinement, sexuality, racism, etc. Students will learn to probe primary-source collections to amplify silenced and overlooked voices, while completing a multi-stage research project. Prior course experience on mass incarceration preferred.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Center for Economy and Society
We examine how capitalism has unfolded as a system over the past century around the world, with the goal of understanding whether there are realistic alternatives to our current social order. We ask what communism was, and why people fear it; why there is more poverty and inequality in the U.S. than other developed countries; how some developing countries have managed to become rich; and the recent rise of “neoliberalism.”
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
The well-known saying “It is not what you know, but who you know” captures nicely the importance of social networks in one’s life chances. From revolutions and collective action to epidemics of contagious diseases, from market outcomes of innovative products to culture wars, social networks shape not only individuals but also society at large. This class will explore how social networks shape society via their impact on individuals, institutions, and structures. Social networks is a rich field of interdisciplinary inquiry, drawing from and contributing to diverse fields such as physics, mathematics, computer science, economics, epidemiology, sociology, and anthropology. This course will mostly stay in the realm of sociology, with a particular emphasis on methodological techniques for analyzing basic social network data.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
East Asian Studies
This course aims to inspire students to explore the impacts, meanings, and explanations of social transformation in contemporary China, via the lens of documentary photography. The photographic images of selective topics will include the products of photojournalism and documentary photography, and several documentary films, by both Chinese and non-Chinese photographers. While one picture is worth thousand words, one picture may also provoke countless interpretations. Students are strongly encouraged to read broadly about different aspects of social transformations in contemporary China, and to select and curate their own subjects of photo images. The spirit of comparative study of documentary photography of China and other parts of world will be strongly encouraged. Active class participation is imperative. A small exhibition on the campus will be organized by the Spring semester. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
We will try to get a quick overview of the recent history of patriarchy in China, South Korea, and Japan from the mid-twentieth century to our present and then compare the initiatives of feminists to transform the lives of women throughout these three societies. We will also debate whether or how it makes sense to adapt the Western notions of patriarchy and sexism as well as the Western political program of feminism to the non-Western context of East Asia by reading books by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
First Year Seminars
How does public opinion shape electoral behavior and the contours of democracy in the United States, and how have these relationships changed as techniques for measuring public opinion have evolved since the early twentieth century? To consider this question, the course introduces alternative perspectives on the features of a healthy democracy, including both historical perspectives and current arguments. Interweaved with this material, the course examines how public opinion is measured and interpreted by private pollsters, survey researchers, and data journalists. Emphasis is placed on the alternative claims that opposing analysts adopt, as well as how the technologies of data collection and analysis shape the permissibility of conclusions. Students will learn to interpret public opinion patterns, which requires a brief presentation of basic concepts from survey sampling, including what to make of the polling industry’s most boring concept: margin of error.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
As a public good, public schooling is often the focus of attempts at purposeful change. Politicians, for example, make policies for fixing schools (public) that never would be entertained for fixing families (private). Parents also make demands of schools, as do a host of other interested parties. Together these stakeholders make up part of the external environment to which schools adapt. But the institutional agents of schooling have interests too—e.g., teachers’ unions, associations of school administrators, the faculty of schools of education—and they too often try to shape the direction of school reform. This First-Year Seminar examines timely, often controversial, issues of education policy and practice through a sociological lens. We will address these topics with discussions of a documentary film on the history of American public schools, readings in contemporary social science, and our own research into specific policy debates.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cults, communes, and conspiracies are unusual social and ideological organizations. How should we understand their origins, structure, and functioning? In our First-Year Seminar, we will assess the value of alternative explanatory concepts from the social sciences, such as charismatic leadership, organizational ecology, network structure, status competition, social influence, and belief propagation. We will then interpret cases in comparative perspective, asking, for example, how cults differ from religious sects, how communes differ from political movements, and how organized crime groups differ from legal businesses.
Popular sovereignty — the idea that the people rule themselves — has been heralded as one of the preeminent innovations of the modern world. And over the course of the last two hundred or so years, a rising tide of nations committed themselves to the principles of popular sovereignty. Yet in recent years, the inevitability, soundness, and very viability of "rule by the people" has come into question. On the one hand, popular uprisings around the globe have rejected the decisions and practices of governing elites on the grounds that they are out of touch with the people’s needs. On the other hand, these uprisings have resurrected and strengthened authoritarian practices and have facilitated the erosion of liberal rights long considered instrumental to preserving democracy. The result — turmoil, unrest, and uncertainty about what the future holds — is evident from Venezuela to England, Turkey to the United States. Can popular sovereignty survive? In what form will the people rule, and at what cost?This First-Year Seminar is an investigation into the idea and practice of popular sovereignty in the contemporary United States. We will explore this topic by actively consulting theory and empirical research in the social sciences. We will supplement this with our own research on the 2022 election, media coverage of issues, popular attitudes about democracy, and popular representation in government and by interest/advocacy groups.Additionally, this class is organized as a collaboration between two first-year seminars: one at Johns Hopkins, the other at Williams College. Over the course of the semester, the two seminars will meet frequently via videoconference to share research and discuss readings and ideas. This is intended to broaden the perspectives brought to bear on our investigation generally and, specifically, to allow each group to share real time research on the politics of the region in which their respective institutions are located.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this First-Year Seminar students will develop an understanding of the ways in which gender structures health and well being through adulthood and later life. The experience of sexual minorities and the ntersection of gender with class and ethnicity will also be discussed. Students will be expected to participate actively and lead discussions on specific topics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Interdepartmental
This course will introduce students to basic concepts in economics, political science and sociology relevant to the study of social problems and the programs designed to remedy them. It will address the many inequalities in access to education and health care, unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, disparities in income and wealth, and differential access to political power. The focus will be on designing effective policies at the national and local level to address these pressing issues. This course is open to all students, but will be required for the new Social Policy Minor. The course is also recommended for students who are interested in law school, medical school, programs in public health, and graduate school in related social science fields. This course does not count as one of the required courses for the Economics major or minor, but it is required for the Social Policy Minor. Cross list with Sociology, Economics and Political Science. Freshman, Sophomore and Juniors only.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course is designed for students who have completed either the Baltimore intensive semester of the Social Policy Minor. The students will make presentations and pursue joint projects based on what they have learned during the intensive semesters concerning key social policy issues.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar examines the Caribbean as a dynamic and multifaceted region shaped by its diverse populations, colonial entanglements, and enduring struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. Emphasizing the Caribbean’s role as a site of political, economic, and cultural innovation, the course engages major themes including indigeneity, slavery and colonial domination, race and racism, gender and sexuality, diaspora, and contested models of “development.” These issues will be analyzed through the writings and perspectives of Caribbean thinkers—both historical and contemporary—who have critically shaped regional and global discourses. Rather than positioning the Caribbean as simply “peripheral,” this course foregrounds the region as a generative space of intellectual, cultural, and political resilience with profound relevance to broader conversations in Latin America and the Global South.
Political Science
While policies were passed to ensure equal opportunity for racially subjugated Americans, the United States witnessed increasing stratification of wealth and income and deepening concentration of poverty, stagnation in closing racial gaps, and new forms of inequality posed by the striking upsurge in contact with the criminal justice system at the bottom of the skills ladder and concentration of wealth at the top. At the same time, the welfare state came under attack and faced challenges posed by an aging population, women entering the labor force, deindustrialization, and international pressures of globalization. Social spending withered in some areas while spending on citizens was increasingly likely to happen through tax expenditures and private means. This course investigates the politics around these developments and competing perspectives in debates over redistributive policies in the United States and their impact on inequality, particularly race and gender inequality. We will examine the contours of inequality and explanations for why it has expanded over the past several decades. We explore why the US is exceptional in both the level of inequality it tolerates and the generosity and types of remedies to alleviate poverty in comparison to its European counterparts and debate the role of race, unions, electoral politics and institutions. We investigate several specific cases of persistent racial inequality – concentrated poverty, segregation, and incarceration. We investigate both how policies have reinforced racial and gender divisions from a top-down perspective as well as examining under what conditions the disadvantaged contest inequality, exploring how political struggle shapes policy from the bottom-up. The last part of the course examines the consequences of inequality and social policy for representation and citizenship and how economic inequality affects political representation and responsiveness of elites to masses.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive