Topics course. This seminar will survey studies of rock and pop music from theoretical perspectives in the sociology of culture and cultural studies. The course will concentrate on analyses of rock and pop music from the last three decades. We will first take an overview of theories of culture that inform many recent studies. Topics covered will include the role of music in everyday life, the political economy of production, cultural control and resistance, youth cultures and local scenes, gender, race and the role of music in politics and protest.

This course is designed to introduce majors to widely used theoretical perspectives that inform the sociological imagination. It focuses on how these perspectives analyze core facets of social life, such as structure and stratification, power and inequality, culture, agency, self and identity. Each topic will be surveyed from several major perspectives, providing a comparative view so that students can make assessments of the insights each theory offers. Enrollment limited to 40 with majors and minors having priority.

This course engages with the various dimensions of globalization through the lens of gender, race, and class relations. We will study how gender and race intersect in global manufacturing and supply chains as well as in the transnational politics of representation and access in global media, culture, consumption, fashion, food, water, war and dissenting voices Prerequisite: SOC 101. Enrollment limited to 35.

This class will explore the relationship between people and their natural environments. Using sociological theories, we will examine how environmental issues are constructed and how they are contested. In examining a series of particular environmental problems, we will consider how social, political and economic structures are related to environmental degradation. Enrollment limited to 35.

An examination of the ways in which the social system creates, maintains, and reproduces gender dichotomies with specific attention to the significance of gender in interaction, culture, and a number of institutional contexts, including work, politics, families and sexuality. Enrollment limited to 35.

This course examines the institution of education from a sociological perspective, exploring issues of power and privilege, relationships between education and other social institutions, and the varying purposes of education in society. A recurring theme throughout the course is meritocracy. We will consider how merit is defined in education, factors that affect who succeeds in the educational system, and whether meritocratic education is a viable goal.

Drawing upon a variety of sociological perspectives and analytical methods, this course considers the place of culture in social life and examines its socially constituted character. Culture, treated as a set of distinctive practices, as symbolic representation, and as a domain of creative expression, will be viewed contextually, in specific social, historical, and institutional locations.

This course analyzes - and at times challenges - the ways in which we understand health, illness and medicine. The course is divided in roughly three parts: first dealing with definitions and representations of health and illness, the second with the significance and impact of biomedical dominance, and the third with the intersections of health, illness and medicine with gender, race, social class and sexual orientation.

A study of the sociological dimensions of urban life. Main areas of inquiry: the processes of urban change; the city as a locus of various social relationships and cultural forms; urban poverty and social conflict; homelessness; and strategies for urban revitalization. Enrollment limited to 35.

This service learning course surveys social science research, literary texts and film media on Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities in the United States. Historic and contemporary causes and contexts of (im)migration, settlement patterns, labor market experiences, demographic profiles, identity formations, and cultural expressions will be considered. Special attention will be paid to both inter- and intra-group diversity, particularly along the lines of race, gender, sexuality and class.