Sociology

This interdisciplinary course examines historical and current social movements in Paris against social and economic disenfranchisement and discrimination based on citizenship, migratory status, racialization, gender, and sexuality. It introduces a wide range of activist tools and historical and current struggles for the access to health, education, and labor rights and against police violence, detention, and incarceration. The course introduces and reflects on a variety of ways of documenting social justice and injustice in France, ranging from documentary film and photography; reports and investigations led by state agencies and non-profit organizations and networks; and museography and artistic expressions. Through urban walks, the course explores spaces of disenfranchisement and gentrification and pays attention to official and non-official memory work, such as monuments, graffiti, and street art in the Parisian city-scape that contribute to commemorate of render invisible specific struggles for social justice.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course is based on the sociological analysis of a selection of films produced in Italy from the end of World War II to the ‘80s with the aim of using Italian movies as telescopes on the past and to reflect on the present of Italian culture, from both the historical and social point of view. At the end of the course, students have knowledge about: Italian cinema from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1980s; political and social transformations from the early 1900s to the 1980s; elements of Italian history from 1900 to post-war period; notions regarding sociological and anthropological models, necessary to interpret social transformations in Italy in the period under analysis. Some of the most important movies of Italian film history are screened such as 900, ROME OPEN CITY, LA DOLCE VITA, BREAD AND CHOCOLATE. This is a sociology course on Italian culture, in which movies are used as data as well as a stimulus for the debate. In addition, another level of analysis concerns the styles, the schools and the directors of the films selected, and the technical and social contexts that influence the different styles. In this light, students consider mass communication linguistic techniques (figures of speech, metaphors, analogies), to identify both clear and hidden messages in movies. The course includes traditional lectures, film screenings, and audiovisual materials.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the role of big data in modern life, as well as its uses as a tool for good or evil. The course highlights how big data can help us understand and explain social phenomena in a way that was unthinkable in previous generations. The course applies the R statistical computing environment to large-scale data sets, explores packages designed for use with big data (such as data.table and ff), and explores how parallelization can be used to analyze lots of data quickly. The course includes traditional lectures, a series of seminars, as well as visual material.

Stratification is one of the oldest areas of study in sociology. This course provides an introduction to the major concepts that are used to study stratification. It also focuses on what early and contemporary sociologists describe as the causes for social stratification. The course allows students to observe and reflect on life under the stratification system and the consequences of inequality and social policies for such problems.