Sociology

This course examines the underlying concepts in indigenous education and the theories that inform current research practice. Particular emphasis is given to theories of ethnicity, culture, indigeneity and colonization and their application to the New Zealand context.

After the publication of the Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, American society came to be understood as a product of evolution. This class focuses on how Darwin's ideas advanced two different views of change that had a tremendous impact on American culture and cultural history. One view, a racial notion of change, presented larger entities, such as species or “human races,” as the driving forces behind societal development. In contrast, a different view located evolutionary change in the lives of individuals. These views had different implications: the racial view reified biological notions of races and emphasized a struggle for existence as a key dynamic of social life. The individual view, on the other hand, drew attention to the dynamics of the human psyche, the importance of (involuntary) memories and subjective perception of the world. In order to study these two dimensions of turn-of-the-century evolutionary thinking, students read texts by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James and others.

This course addresses the core concerns of power, domination, inequality, class formation, and transnational political economy, while grounding them ethnographically in urban space. Rather than treating these concepts abstractly, students encounter them through detailed case studies of how colonial spatial logics persist in contemporary cities and how urban residents navigate, reproduce, and contest these structures. The course traces connections between colonial urbanism and contemporary urban transformation across the Global South and in Berlin itself. Students develop analytical tools for understanding how political-economic processes materialize in urban form, social practice, and everyday experience.

This course introduces key issues and activities in South African society today. It presents how to search for and identify accurate information and relevant ideas, situating these in a social context, and outlining views around key social issues. We live in a society with deeply structured social inequalities and a range of issues and problems which people confront every day. What is actually happening to people positioned differently in society? What is changing and what is continuing? How do ordinary people deal with these issues? What forms of organization and action do they turn to as they try to meet their needs and build lives which are fulfilling and dignified? This course examines selected social processes, structures, institutions and behaviors to understand these issues and ways of dealing with them. DP requirements: Completion of all written tests, essays and assignments as set. Assessment: tests, essays and assignments (50%) final exam (50%).

This course provides students with the theoretical, contextual and strategic knowledge and skills that will equip them to advocate for the early childhood profession, young children and diverse families and communities. Students critique community, national and international levels of policy, frameworks and practices relevant to advocacy with and for children, families, communities, non-governmental organizations and professions. Te Tiriti o Waitangi provides an underpinning framework for the advocacy models to be developed in the course.

The firm plays a central role in contemporary capitalist societies. Firms not only shape economic outcomes, but also concentrate power and produce conflict within society. Understanding the firm, therefore, requires moving beyond a purely economic perspective to examine how firms organize power and authority within broader social and political contexts. The course uses case studies and empirical examples from the United States to assess the applicability of theoretical perspectives. The first block introduces foundational theories of the firm, emphasizing the centrality of the means of production in capitalist societies. The second block focuses on the role of workers and the organization of labor within the firm. This section covers workers’ relations with capital and output, as well as the division of labor and changes in bargaining power. The last block explores multinational corporations as central actors in globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and examines how the expansion of global value chains and accelerating technological change have increased their power and transformed their role in society.

This course is conducted as an interdisciplinary seminar, with student-led discussions on major works in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. Students survey the literature in roughly chronological order, discuss several works of dystopian fiction and film, and delve into the political and ethical debates surrounding the threat of human extinction. Topics include contemporary debates in philosophical ethics, science, asteroids, and politics, concerned primarily with anthropogenic threats such as nuclear disaster, climate change, and misaligned Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).  

This course first combs the development context of sociological theories, then analyzes classic domestic and international topics in tourism sociology on this basis, while keeping pace with emerging theories and empirical studies amid the mobile internet era. Through the course, students will clarify the research nature and core content of tourism sociology, and gradually develop the ability to examine tourism phenomena with a theoretical perspective and critical thinking.

This course focuses on the study of language in its social context, a branch of Linguistics that is referred to as sociolinguistics. The course includes topics such as: introduction (basic concepts and issues in sociolinguistics); regional variation; social variation; language change, language and social media; multilingualism; language and interaction; gender and language; language contact; pidgins, creoles and new Englishes; language planning and policy; language and education; the sociolinguistics of sign language. DP requirements: None. Assessment: Continuous assessment (essays, projects, tests, etc.) counts 100%.

The course examines the politics of migration and border management in the European Union, focusing on immigration and asylum policies, border securitization, refugee management, and the externalization of migration control. Students analyze the political and social implications of these policies, including debates over European identity, xenophobia, and anti-immigration discourse.