Sociology

This course is designed for students wishing to clarify and advance their career goals through an 8-week internship in Thailand. It provides a structured learning environment to help students make the most of their internship experience. While there are no regularly scheduled class meetings, internships are conducted under the close academic supervision of the School of Global Studies at Thammasat University. An assigned internship coordinator provides oversight and guidance for the duration of the internship. The course requires a minimum of 288 total work hours. 

This course examines social research methods. It introduces how to conduct scientific research on social phenomena and social processes.

This course offers an introduction to the study of crime from a sociological perspective. It examines the main sociological schools that have contributed to the field of criminology: Chicago School, Functionalism, and New Chicago School.

A flourishing modern society can be promoted by volunteerism and civic engagement. Considering that volunteerism is perceived as a crucial indicator of livable society, it has been a concern of many countries including Singapore to promote volunteering among citizens. Mainly through various non-profit voluntary organizations, volunteer workforce helps attain the goal of civic, livable, and harmonious society. This course thus pursues three main themes: (1) the relationship between civil society and civic engagement, (2) the precursors of volunteer workforce (i.e., what makes people volunteer?), and (3) the outcomes of volunteerism (e.g., life satisfaction, health, and status attainment).

The aim of this course is to provide basic knowledge about current racialized formations of gender, citizenship, and migration. Social, economic, political as well as cultural dimensions of citizenship and migration are addressed. The course engages with key theoretical debates in the field, in particular postcolonial and feminist conceptual investigations of citizenship, (non)belonging, and migration.

This is the second of a three-module course on qualitative research methods. This module builds on what students have learned in part I and is designed to guide them through the steps of data collection for their qualitative study. Students work on gaining access to their research site and begin the interview process and/or their observations and conversations with their research participants as participant observers. Students are introduced to the process of transcribing the interviews, coding the data, and memo writing. All three steps are part of qualitative data analysis. As students develop their research projects, they are challenged to link their specific research questions to larger processes and forces. They also are asked to consider who might find their research useful and how the results of their investigations might be utilized to promote social change. In-depth analysis of the intricacies underlying contemporary social, cultural, and political discourses and practices, provides the basis for good social research. This is a time and labor-intensive skills training, especially once data collection has begun. Most of the required work occurs outside of the class setting. Students are expected to work independently and should count on having to invest an extra two to four hours per week in interviewing, transcribing the interviews, and working on the data collection.

This course explores the violent, unremitting nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it has shaped Israeli society. It examines topics such as Jerusalem's fate, the Palestinian refugees, the settlements, and security concerns. The course builds a multilayered perspective on conflict resolution efforts through examination of the Oslo peace process and other past and present activities by the Israeli peace camp.

The course invites students to consider the ways in which the investments of literary and critical theory—most centrally language, class, race, gender, and sexuality—have intersected and overlapped in relation to socio-political transformations from the 1970s to the present. Each week is organized around one or more of these intersections, which students address though discussions of critical and literary texts and films. Topics of discussion might include the relationship between waged and unwaged work, and the systems of gender and race that are organized around the poles of this relationship; the construction of categories that are presented as “normal”; the category of the human; the relationship between finance and representation; the politics of visibility; the relationship between aesthetics and social structure; the challenge of trying to define the social, political, and cultural characteristics of the present (and the recent past).