Changes in transportation, information, and communication technology, as well as artificial intelligence and automation are rapidly transforming occupational and commercial arrangements. These forces of transnational economic integration undermine conventional organizational and commercial forms, and in so doing alter the ways people execute work and management in many fields.
This course offers a critical analysis of what it means to be a man using a sociological lens. Feminist scholars made gender visible, problematizing both femininities and masculinities in order to challenge and transform unequal gender relations. Yet until recent decades, men were rather invisible as men, as gendered beings, in academic research. Building on the insights of gender studies, the course emphasizes the socially constructed, power-laden, and historically and culturally variable character of masculinities in its multiple forms.
The world is becoming increasingly interconnected, with the movement of people, capital, and cultures across borders transforming lives all over the globe. Yet globalization also shapes, and is shaped by, gender, class, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, and other axes of difference and inequality. This course examines how gender relations are embedded in practices of globalizing capitalism. Not only does globalization shape the lives of men and women in distinct ways, but the social and economic changes accompanying globalization affect power relations involved in masculine domination.
This course examines how culture, identity, and ethics are implicated in economic development efforts around the globe and here at home. Through a critical examination of major development theories and their assumptions about the nature of the global system and the meaning of difference within it, the course explores whose ideas about development matter, how they manifest in terms of particular policies and politics, and what stakes they pose for different social groups.
This course explores the rise of identity politics within Latin America since the 1990s. It asks how ethnic, racial, feminist, sexual, and transnational identity politics have shaped the nature and goals of a diverse array of social movements in the region. It draws on ethnographic analyses to analyze how specific instances of identity politics emerged from particular historical and national contexts to challenge traditional hierarchies of power in new ways.
Gender surrounds us, but ideas about gender in popular culture often oversimplify its workings. This course provides an overview of a sociological perspective on gender, with close attention to the relational construction of gender difference through analyzing both femininities and masculinities, as well as how gender intersects with other differences such as race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. The first half of the course examines gender inequality from several classic and contemporary theoretical perspectives.
This course challenges students to learn to 'see' families sociologically and to think critically and comparatively about the family as an ideological construct and as a complex social institution. Rather than assuming a universal model of the family, course readings examine families in the United States and elsewhere in the world as diverse entities shaped by economic and political factors, gender ideologies, racial and class inequalities, sexual norms, and cultural changes.
The field of criminology covers two main areas: (1) analysis of law-breaking and (2) investigation of the ways in which laws are made and enforced by the criminal justice system. The first seeks to answer the question, Why do people break (or follow) the law? The second asks, How is (criminal) law made and enforced? These issues are examined historically and cross-nationally but there is particular attention given to contemporary conditions in the United States, a country with a high rate of offending and probably the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
This course offers an in-depth exploration of multiple theories of deviance and social control. Each section of the class is organized around a particular theoretical orientation; each theory will elucidate both how deviance happens and the mechanism of social control that align with that particular theory. Every theory covered in this course is situated within a social, historical, and political context. Social and scientific theories are socially constructed, and thus, the context in which they emerge and exist is fundamental to their basic understanding.
Disability studies offers perhaps the most trenchant critique of "the hegemony of the normal"--that is, the reification and privileging of certain numerical indices (for example, IQ score; body mass index; weight and height; complete blood count; range of motion; brainwave frequencies; and other such measurements which are then regarded as "better" or "worse" than comparable numbers).