COVID-19 has upended schooling in the United States. Assumptions about physical co-presence, standardized testing, the rights of students, and the responsibilities of schools have all been transformed at warp speed. The pandemic also exposed durable fault lines in American education and society. This course provides an opportunity to evaluate our present moment using classical and contemporary sociological perspectives on mass schooling.

This course is an introduction to the use of quantitative data in sociology. It focuses on the ways in which data is collected, analyzed, and presented to make sociological arguments. It introduces various tools to describe data for single variables, explore relationships between pairs of variables, and make statistical inferences. Students will learn basic skills to conduct their own social science research and analyze data using statistical software.

This is a course on the social construction of social problems. It devotes almost exclusive attention to how a 'problem' becomes a social problem; examining how atypical cases become regarded as typical; how definitions are expanded to inflate statistics; and how claim makers and advocacy groups manipulate the media to market social problems and solutions to the public.

This course examines instances of organized collective action in social, historical, and empirical contexts, from the labor movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the new social movements of today. We also explore various forms of unstructured protest, such as riots and demonstrations.

For students who are comfortable in the water with a few basic swimming skills. Reviews the basic front and back strokes, floating and treading water. Introduces additional strokes and techniques.

This course looks at the central concerns of consumer culture through the lens of race and ethnicity. Through exploring issues such as multicultural marketing and advertising, discrimination in e-commerce, consumer boycotts, and urban food deserts, students will gain theoretical and empirical insight on the ways that racial and ethnic boundaries shape, and are shaped by, consumption.

This seminar examines topics in cultural sociology and contemporary social theory. The first part of the class asks: How do we imagine social things? The second part of the class reviews the history of social theory with a focus on the multiple crises of the modernity narrative, and various attempts to resolve these crises. The final third of the class poses the question of how to analyze culture and "do" social theory.

For students who are comfortable in the water with a few basic swimming skills. Reviews the basic front and back strokes, floating and treading water. Introduces additional strokes and techniques.

In this critical survey of the main theoretical perspectives in contemporary sociology, we focus specifically on structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, critical theory, feminism, and postmodernism. Besides gaining familiarity with these alternative perspectives, we try to identify the main axes of theoretical dispute in sociology and discuss the problems of evaluating and resolving conflict between theories.

This course is part of a nationally-recognized program in Rape Aggression Defense (RAD). It will cover "streetwise" self-defense techniques, including stances, blocking, kicking, striking, voice commands and ground defense. It will also impart techniques for risk awareness, risk recognition and risk reduction.