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.
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 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.
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): 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.
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 examines the modern transformation of social life from the prism of coffee and tea. The topics include colonial expansion and cash-crop production, pan-Asianism and Orientalism, the question of the public sphere, and food nationalism.
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
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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 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
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.
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
Rural China is experiencing profound socioeconomic and political transformations during four decades of reform. When millions of rural migrants leave their hometown to work in factories, the countryside is simultaneously being remade by the expansion of cities and state policies that seek to revolutionize Chinese agriculture. These ongoing and uncertain dynamics reshape social relations, conflicts, and tensions among state, peasants, and capital in the rural social space. This course examines the historical origins, uncertain processes, and profound social consequences of these major changes that are taking place in post-reform rural China. The course is organized around 4 modules. In each of them, students will first read about key concepts and theoretical frameworks, such as socialist primitive accumulation, collective action, social reproduction, and peasant moral economy. They will then use these analytical tools to critically engage with the more empirically grounded research on China’s agrarian transformation. While the course primarily focuses on China, students will have opportunities to conduct research on other parts of the world, which will provide useful, comparative viewpoints.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How do men and women make decisions about marriage and childbearing, negotiate work-family demands, and divide housework and childcare? Why are East Asian societies experiencing lowest-low fertility? What are the legacies of the one-child policy? How does homosexuality transcend patriarchal family? To answer these questions, this course will explore in depth the dynamics of family, gender, and sexuality in contemporary East Asia (mainly China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How do children end up attending the schools they do? Children in the United States have historically attended schools based on where they live, but school choice policies have changed how students are sorted into schools. This development is consequential for children’s schooling experiences, how schools and school systems operate, and the ways that schooling as an institution reflects and generates economic and racial inequalities. In this course, students will examine the different forms that school choice takes in the United States today as well as parents’ school decision-making. Drawing on insights from sociology as well as history, philosophy, and political science, this course will ask students to think critically about the ways that policy and parental decision-making intersect to shape children’s lives and the nation’s schools.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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
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? 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
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.
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
Global migration is a hot topic in the news and in political campaigns today. It has reached an unprecedented size, and it has also fueled countless social protests around racial, ethnic, and class-based tensions. Indeed, the speed, size, and controversies around global migration are re-shaping our conventional understandings of the nation-state, citizenship, and welfare rights. But global migration is not new. Therefore contemporary migration raises important questions about what is and is not unique about the present moment. This course will begin my introducing students to the long history of global migration and capitalism. It will then examine the various aspects of contemporary migration--covering issues of gender, South-South migration, class and skill, sending and receiving countries' roles in controlling migration, migrants' protests, diaspora organizations, and the connections between immigration and emigration. Through in-depth reading and discussion, the course engages students in understanding and critiquing contentious perspectives on these issues. The course aims to provide students with a solid understanding of the theories, methodologies, research, and debates that shape contemporary discussions of international migration and development.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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 surveys the relationship between China and Chinese overseas 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.
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
This course investigates two familiar concepts in sociology: race and caste. For the majority of theoretical contributions on race and caste focus on North America or the developed world, this course aims at advancing an understanding of race and caste from non-western experiences. In modern history, many scholars have debated the similarities and differences between the two concepts and the course aims at introducing the students to these writings. The course focuses on a specific historical phase: capitalism. To build more explicit connections of both race and caste with class, the course will focus on developments since colonization in most of the world, which introduced capitalist relations as a hegemonic force. The students will engage with broader questions such as: how are caste and race different from and similar to each other? Is it possible to use one category to describe the other? If so, how? What are the essential elements of these two categories in their given social contexts? How does incorporating ‘class’ into analysis shape the defining elements of race and caste?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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
Cryptocurrencies? NFTs? Meme stocks? What is happening in contemporary capitalism? To answer this question, our seminar will facilitate an in-depth engagement with the theories and histories of finance capitalism. We will focus on how the financial transformations of capitalism over the past century have been theorized and historicized towards answering the following questions: is finance capitalism an aberration, a phase, or the norm of capitalism? What are the underlying forces driving financialization? What is the relationship between finance capitalism, economic crises, rising indebtedness, and racial capitalism? And what can we say about where contemporary capitalism is headed? This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach, reading prominent thinkers across political economy, history, sociology, geography, and political science. Our readings and discussions will explore the past, structure, and movement of contemporary capitalist society and help to orient us in this bewildering era of financial exuberance, taking stock of the present and its possible trajectories.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
This seminar examines inter-regional connections and diplomacy in maritime Asia (focusing on the region around the Straits of Malacca, South and East China Seas, and the Taiwan Straits). In addition to a survey of world-system theories on Asia, the reading materials cover the maritime silk road, Chinese tribute trade system, British free-trade imperialism, American open-door policy, Japanese pan-Asianism, Cold-war diplomacy, and the Beijing-led Belt-and-Road Initiatives. The goal is to explore the prospects and limitations of examining East and Southeast Asia beyond the inter-state framework.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the works of four classical theorists whose ideas have fundamentally influenced the ways we study and understand society: Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. In the section on Marx, we will also read contributions by his close collaborator, Frederick Engels.
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.
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.
A discussion-oriented seminar focused on major recent writings on the family, in both the developed and developing nations.
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.
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.