Introduces students to basic sociological concepts and perspectives, and applies them to a variety of topics including family, work, and the dynamics of class, gender, and racial/ethnic inequalities in the United States and globally.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Why do billions of people continue to live in poverty? What obstacles stand in the way of secure and dignified lives for all? Who is most likely to bring about change, what strategies should they follow, and what kinds of institutions should they put in place? 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 the optimal conditions and strategies for generating economic growth and on the relationship between growth, 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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces the origins, operation and impacts of five major revolutions in modern China between 1850 and 1950. These include the Taiping Rebellion, the republican revolutions, federalist and southern automatic movements, labor strikes as well as peasant rebellions. It draws on the existing historiography that examines China’s transition from an empire to a republic, impacts of western and Japanese influences to China, as well as the continuity and change of Chinese social organizations. Cross list with International Studies and East Asian Studies. Fulfills IS History requirement.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce students to the field of urban studies and Baltimore itself. Students will learn data collection and analysis methods used in the social sciences. Students will discuss relevant research published in urban studies by Johns Hopkins faculty and other experts in the field. Students will also gain an introduction to their adopted home, Baltimore, by collecting data and conducting field observations in different neighborhoods.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The purpose of this course is to provide a sound introduction to the overall process of research and the specific research methods most frequently used by sociologists and other social scientists. Required for Sociology majors and IS GSCD track students.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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): Statistics Sequence restriction: students who have completed any of these courses may not register: EN.550.211 OR EN.550.230 OR EN.550.310 OR EN.550.311 OR EN.550.413 OR EN.550.420 OR EN.550.420 OR EN.550.420 OR EN.560.435 OR AS.280.345 OR AS.200.314 OR AS.200.315 OR EN.560.348;Statistics Sequence Restriction: Students who have completed EN.550.111 OR EN.550.113 may not enroll.
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of how each theorist answered three major questions: 1) what is the origin, structure and historical dynamic of modern society?; 2) how do we gain an accurate knowledge of society?; 3) what are the conditions of possibility for freedom in modern society? In comparing, applying and critiquing their respective theories, students will advance their own theory of society.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines the new wave of social protest and popular uprisings in contemporary Africa through the interconnected themes of land, labor, and environmental movements.Attention will be placed on the early 21st century.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to issues of global social change, with a particular focus on the challenges of international development and the contemporary globalization process. Specific themes include world income inequality and global poverty, the rise of supranational organizations (e.g. WTO and EU) and their relations with sovereign states, anti-globalization activism, the rise of China and India in the global economy, and the origins as well as consequences of the current global economic crisis and global pandemics, among others. Lectures will be aided by documentary films and other multi-media materials. Special Note: Fulfills Economics requirement for IS GSCD track students only. Formerly offered as AS 230.353. Students who took AS.230.353 cannot take AS.230.221.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the trajectory of economic development in China since the beginning of market reforms in the late 1970s, with a special focus on social inequality and forms of resistance that have emerged in response to the expansion of the market economy. The first part of the course focuses on understanding the academic debates around China’s economic miracle and introduces students to theories about the relationship between market expansion and social resistance. The second part focuses on key thematic topics including the rural/urban divide, rural protest, urban inequality and labor unrest, gender and sexuality in social movements, environmental protests, and the politics of ethnic relations.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do we define an intimate partnership and what role does it play in society? At the turn of the 20th Century socially sanctioned intimate partnerships existed primarily in the context of marriage between a man and a woman. These partnerships formed the center of family units and provided a foundation of social stability for the individuals that entered them. Since then, additional forms of intimate partnerships have become more widely accepted through dating and cohabitation, while marriage has become less stable. In this course, we will explore the evolution of marriage as the dominant type of intimate partnership in society and the concurrent rise of dating, cohabitation, and divorce. Using the context of how these intimate partnerships have changed in recent decades, students will explore and define the role these different types of partnerships serve in society today.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Examining the exchange of culture, people, and commodities between the United States and Mexico since the 19th century, this course asks not just how US practices and policies have shaped Mexican society, but how, in turn, Mexico has shaped the United States. We will examine the social, political, and economic forces that have long pulled these two societies together – and pushed them apart.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course introduces the transformation of the coffee and tea industries in the long nineteenth century against the backdrop of European and Japanese colonial expansion. It surveys the social changes in the colonial world under the development of the cash crop economy. It also analyzes how the consumption of such caffeinated beverages became sources of heritage makings both in the metropoles and colonies and the latter's postcolonial reconstructions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce students to a range of software programs that are critical for conducting social scientific research in the 21st century. Students will develop competency in the use of computer programs for statistical analysis, database management, the creation of maps and timelines, and the presentation of research reports. The course uses examples from ongoing social science faculty research projects at Johns Hopkins on global inequality and international development. Required for GSCD track students.Course previously titled "Research Tools and Technologies for the Social Sciences"
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do we think about the power relations at work in the scholarship we read and in the important texts we consider essential to our educational experience? This course will critically investigate the role that concepts of race and racism have played in formulating dominant perceptions of who can be the producers of knowledge and what constitutes authoritative knowledge itself. We will consider how and why thinkers and scholarship produced outside of Europe and North America are too often ignored for their scholarly contributions and the dynamics that lead to this situation. We will also explore how and why new and important perspectives emerge from engaging and centering voices from beyond traditional canonical works. With a particular focus on the forms of knowledge arising from European Enlightenment approaches to concepts of thought reason and objective knowledge, this course will critically engage students with a wide range of thinkers such asGWF Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ralph Trouillot, Sadiya Hartman, Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon. This course will focus largely on thinkers engaging within the Black Atlantic and black diaspora traditions to question how we might consider voices and thought from beyond Eurocentric positions in our own scholarly practice.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course analyzes educational systems as social institutions and organizations. It gives particular attention to the often taken-for-granted ways that we structure learning in schools and their consequences for social inequality. To these ends, the course will examine classical institutional and organizational theory in sociology and evaluate these theories in their application to historical process of educational formation and the contemporary organization of K-12 schooling in the US.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This class offers an advanced engagement of various topics in international development. The course begins with an historical examination of the actors and global events, as well as the intellectual debates, that birthed the field of international development as a discrete area of study and practice. We will then analyze the evolving theories that dominated the first five decades of the international development effort. The final part of the course will examine more recent perspectives that have attempted to fill the intellectual void left by the demise of the traditional development paradigm. Here we will cover topics that span the global North and South, including issues of race/caste/ethnicity, migration, gender, and right-wing nationalism. Some prior knowledge of international development is recommended
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course is an examination of sociological theories and studies of African-American families and an overview of the major issues confronting African-American family life. The contemporary conditions of black families are explored, as well as the historical events that have influenced the family patterns we currently observe. Special attention will be given to social policies that have evolved as a result of the prominence of any one perspective at a given point in time.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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. This course fulfills the "research practicum" requirement for the Sociology major.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course employs a comparative perspective to examine the gendered impact of international development experiences and policies. Students will discuss the historical evolution of how the concept of gender has been constructed, conceptualized, and integrated into international development theory and practice. The course will also examine how greater international development. In particular, we will examine structural theories of poverty reduction, individual theories of power and processes of stratification at the household and family level. Specific issue areas will include the globalization, class and work political participation and social movements. Cross-listed with International Studies (CP, IR). Fulfills Economics requirement for IS GSCD track students only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course, students will learn about analyzing revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, with a focus on their strategic dimensions. Contributions from the military, counterinsurgency, sociology of revolution, historical materialist, world-system, and critical realist literature will provide different visions of strategy and tactics. The cases of Guatemala and Chile in the early 1980s and 1970s, respectively, will provide historical and empirical roots to class discussions about these different approaches and the possibilities of synthesizing them.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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? Special emphasis will be placed on (1) “the late-nineteenth century great depression”, (2) the Great Depression of the 1930s, and (3) the period of crisis and stagflation in the 1970s. We will be particularly concerned to understand 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? How have environmental and ecological challenges resurfaced in each crisis including today?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The schools that children attend and the neighborhoods in which they live are critically important sites of mental and physical development, socialization, and academic achievement. These contexts in which children live and learn are also highly segregated by race and class, resulting in spatially stratified opportunities for social mobility – what social scientists call “the geography of opportunity.” This course explores social inequality through the lens of space, place, and geography, with a particular focus on how these dynamics shape educational inequality in the United States. Drawing on readings from sociology, demography, psychology, history, economics, urban planning, and public health, this course will teach students to think critically about how individual choices and public policies interact with dynamics of space and place to create and maintain social inequality.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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 history of fossil capitalism; the relationship between social inequality and “vulnerability” to climate change (including heat waves, drought, rising seas, and extreme weather); climate migration and the political economy of “adaptation”; the merits of various mitigation strategies, including the Green New Deal, conservation offsets, and geo-engineering; the roots of climate denialism; and climate justice movements. Students will write a final research paper on a sociological aspect of climate change.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Does capitalism promote democracy and stability, or repression, racial conflict, and social unrest? Following the 2008 financial crisis, countries around the world have experienced severe economic and political crises, giving rise to explosive movements that have challenged the viability of capitalism and democracy as durable systems. By considering these developments, this course examines the core political dimensions of capitalist societies. We will define and discuss key terms, like capitalism, racial capitalism, the capitalist state, democracy, social movements, and more. We will pay special attention to the ways in which the economic, political, and ideological structures of capitalist societies shape and are shaped by social movements and political parties. The course is global in perspective, drawing on developments in many countries, with a special focus on the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines Latin American insertion into the global capitalist economy from the colonial period to the present. Examining various historical, sociological, and political-economic theories, this course will ask not only how Latin American economies and societies have developed their particular characteristics, but also how theorists within and outside the region have understood Latin American development over time.development over time.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course combines lecture and class discussion. It examines the history and historiography of Chinese overseas migration. Major issues include overseas Chinese as “merchants without empire,” Chinese exclusion acts in the age of mass migration, the “Chinese question” in postcolonial Southeast Asia, as well as the making and unmaking of Chinese identity in the current wave of globalization.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not have completed AS.230.217 previously.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course uses the city of Baltimore as a lens through which to explore issues of urban inequality. We will focus on Baltimore's history of racial segregation and concentrated poverty, and its effect on the social and economic well-being of the city and its residents, with attention to education, employment, health and crime. Students will learn how to employ Census data, GIS approaches, and sociological research to inform questions about population change, inequality and the distribution of resources across the city and metropolitan region. Students will also work on one or more policy relevant studies based in Baltimore, including: a project on abandoned and vacant housing, a desegregation intervention, and a longitudinal study of inner city youth. Finally, students will become familiar with Baltimore City's programs and policy approaches to addressing the city's most pressing problems, and will design innovative and effective and innovative solutions as part of their course assignments. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students that took AS.360.357 may not take AS.230.357
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The “grabbing” of land and natural resources has, in recent years, generated widespread political conflict across the world and put dispossession on the agenda of academics and policy-makers. Nevertheless, compared to other social relations of power, land dispossession has not been central to scholarly or public understandings of capitalism, the state, development, or politics. In this class, we will collectively explore the nascent field that we might call the sociology of dispossession. We will examine existing theories of dispossession, and proceed to challenge, reconstruct or supplant those theories as we consider a wide range of historical examples of dispossession from the English Enclosures and colonial plunder to contemporary urban redevelopment and rural land grabs. This is a reading- and writing-intensive seminar.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the reciprocal relationship between Black social thought and social movements. How have social movements informed thinkers who grapple with questions of freedom and liberation in racially and economically stratified societies, and how have their ideas affected movement tactics? This course will look at 20th century movements and investigate connections between theory and practice through concepts like civil disobedience, internal colonialism, Black feminism, Black internationalism, and others.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course discusses how geopolitics, technology as well as social differentiation (such as race, class and gender) shape the structure of economic actions. Special attention will be paid to patterns of state-business relationship, labor processes, migrant economy, globalization and international division of labor.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sociological perspectives on contemporary family life, including marriage and divorce, cohabitation, single parenthood, same sex partnerships, children’s wellbeing, balancing work and family responsibilities, domestic violence, and government policy toward families.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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?".
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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 major social theorists of the 20th century advanced novel answers to these questions as they grappled with the historical events and social concerns of the 20thcentury—the Russian revolution and its degeneration into Stalinism, the failure of communist movements in the West, the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism, the consolidation of capitalist democracies and welfare states, the emergence of anti-colonial movements in the “Third World,” and the persistence of race, gender and sexuality as forms of domination. In addition to understanding and comparing theories, we will assess their usefulness for understanding the present. This is a reading and writing-intensive seminar.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will focus on key writings of Guyanese scholar and intellectual, Walter Rodney (1942-1980) with an emphasis on evaluating his legacy and the relevance of his work for the 21st century, globally and locally. The main course readings are Rodney’s three major books—(1) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; (2) History of the Guyanese Working People; and (3) Groundings with my Brothers. The course will provide students with the background necessary to participate in the January 31, 2020 workshop on the legacy of Walter Rodney organized by the JHU Arrighi Center for Global Studies.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The goal of the seminar is to examine the prospects and limits of understanding the incorporation of Asia in the capitalist world-system from the prism of oceanic connections. The theoretical thrust of this course is to develop but also to adapt Janet Abu-Lughod emphasis on the connections across port cities and littoral in the Afro-Eurasian continents before the long sixteenth century in her Before European Hegemony. But instead of looking at a port city as its adjacent hinterland polity’s gateway to global trade in the premodern era, the course examines the multifarious coast-hinterland relationships. The readings are organized by a chronological order, which begins with the historical maritime silk road between the third and thirteenth centuries, and will be followed by Asian port cities in the European age of empire and postwar American-led Cold War Structure, as well as the present-day Chinese New Silk Road Diplomacy. Students are expected to select an issue of regional tensions and to analyze its historical root.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
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.
TBA
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
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.
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 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.
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
This course provides the students with a set of statistical tools to understand and interpret social science research dealing with categorical dependent variables and to prepare students to apply these models in their own research. The models covered in the course include logit, probit, Poisson, and log-linear models, as well as multi-level models of categorical dependent variables.
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.
Advanced seminar for PhD students who are preparing their dissertation proposals or writing their dissertations. Sociology graduate students only.
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.
This course covers the sources of inequality in contemporary metropolitan areas. It will investigate traditional and contemporary theories that explain the sociological processes that lead to inequality and the methods used to provide empirical evidence.
A discussion-oriented seminar focused on major recent writings on the family, in both the developed and developing nations.
In-depth reading and discussion of theories and research on immigration to the U.S. theoretical issues include international migration, immigration, and assimilation. Research topics include: the impact of U.S. immigration laws on immigrant inflows and stocks, self-selection of immigrants, the impact of immigration on the native-born population, and the adaptation of the first and second generations. The course focuses on immigration since 1965 and its related controversies and debates.
Computational social science is an interdisciplinary field combining social science and data science. Today’s digital age presents both opportunities and risks to social scientists with the availability of increasingly big and complex data that depart from traditional data in remarkable ways. This course offers a foundational basis for social science students to embark upon the field. The weekly 2-hour seminar introduces the topics of big data ethics; research designs for the collection and use of digital trace data, automated texts, government administrative data, and large-scale social network data; new forms of surveys and experiments; and mass data collaborations. Research publications are used to illustrate each topic. The weekly 1-hour labs are for group activities on the weekly topic. There are no social science or data science prerequisites.
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The emphasis of this course will be on participant observation and interviews in a fieldwork context (that is, research that takes place in the space and time of “subjects” rather than the observer). While the best way to learn a method is by doing, the pandemic is likely to make a practicum impossible this semester. Therefore, the course will be structured around reading classic or illustrative monographs and articles based on qualitative fieldwork, in both a US and global context. This will be supplemented with a smaller number of methodological texts to introduce different conceptions of science used or assumed by qualitative sociologists. We will also address practical skills like taking ethnographic fieldnotes.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do we think about the power relations at work in the scholarship we read and in the important texts we consider essential to our educational experience? This course will critically investigate the role that concepts of race and racism have played in formulating dominant perceptions of who can be the producers of knowledge and what constitutes authoritative knowledge itself. We will consider how and why thinkers and scholarship produced outside of Europe and North America are too often ignored for their scholarly contributions and the dynamics that lead to this situation. We will also explore how and why new and important perspectives emerge from engaging and centering voices from beyond traditional canonical works. With a particular focus on the forms of knowledge arising from European Enlightenment approaches to concepts of thought reason and objective knowledge, this course will critically engage students with a wide range of thinkers such asGWF Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ralph Trouillot, bell hooks, Walter Rodney, Gayatri Spivak, Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon. This course will focus largely on thinkers engaging within the Black Atlantic and black diaspora traditions to question how we might consider voices and thought from beyond Eurocentric positions in our own scholarly practice.
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.