Sociology

This lecture series seeks to analyze North America via the analytical lens of movement/movements. Whether one follows cable news coverage on Latin American refugees, learns about supply chain disruptions due to COVID-lockdowns in newspapers, or follow BLM protests on social media accounts: on a daily basis people are witnessing various forms of “movement.” These range from people on the move, items being shipped to humans joining forces in order to pursue common goals. Admittedly, these are not recent phenomena. Migration, international trade, and political advocacy by social movements have been with us – and shaped our societies – for centuries. Yet, looking at those seemingly distinct events and phenomena from a multidisciplinary angle provides fruitful new insights. The lectures hence address the issue of “movement” from various theoretical and disciplinary angles. Ranging from historical accounts of the labor movement to podcasts as an “audiomovement,” this series intends to make sense of the multi-faceted nature of movement/movements.

As the global population speeds past seven billion, mounting evidence about resource depletion and climate change, and global economic inequality and social injustice, suggests current human development is unsustainable and that we are now living in the “Anthropocene” – an era in which human activity has, for the first time, become the dominant driver of environmental processes, and is causing unprecedented global change. The course shows how Geography, a discipline that draws on knowledge that spans the social and natural sciences and the humanities, is uniquely placed to understand our changing world.

This course explored and analyzes major institutions, actors, and trends in contemporary French and European Media and attempts to situate them in the larger contexts of “unifying” Europe and “globalized” world-media-scene. Students examine the operational schemes, performances, and internal decisional and power structures of different branches of French media: print national & regional press, specialized magazines, the publishing industry, advertising, radio, television, and the Internet. The course attempts a specific analysis regarding the international and French implications of the growing potential of social networks and “New Media.” Students review aspects of the growing confusion –both in terms of competition and compatibility—between “new” and “old” media and their political, social, and cultural impacts. In the domain of social and political presence students study and question practices of newsgathering, deontological principles and constraints, media performance under pressure of time, context, profit-making-structures, politics, violence, ethics, and ideologies. The course examines forms and styles of “information,” editorial policies and the variety of notions of “Democratic pluralism” and “freedom of expression” across the French and European Media landscapes. We will try to define, decode, and interpret distinctions between “news,” “commentary,” and “analysis” as they are being treated on the French and European media scenes. The course analyzes what all these may mean, encourage, cultivate, or block in terms of politics, society, culture, and media during “high times” of political turmoil, violent crisis, or social unrest. In the domain of entertainment and “services” offered by the Media, students examine different variations of publishing, broadcasting, and “accompanying” practices over the last 20-30 years. We may attempt a parallel analysis of possible interaction between these two domains (News/Entertainment), following political and ideological lines and some study of the dynamics of change along the ambitions, the strategies and the priorities of the media industries alongside “public demand.”

This course studies human society and introduces students to the field of sociology. Although the module provides theoretical perspectives of sociology, students are encouraged to explore a wide variety of empirical situations. Korean examples of relevant social issues are discussed. 

This course is an upper-division introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language, and to what characterizes human language and makes it different from other animal communication systems and other human cognitive systems. The course introduces the different components that human language is made of and how linguists investigate them. In particular, it looks at sounds (and signs) and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to words (phonetics, phonology, and morphology); it looks at words and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to sentences (syntax); finally, it looks at how words and sentences can be used to convey meaning (semantics and pragmatics). While doing so, it emphasizes the innate cognitive aspects of human language but also touches on those aspects that are sensitive to culture and society and determine some of the variation and differences among human languages. Some of the question the course addresses include: what is a language and what does knowledge of a language consist of; are human languages fundamentally different from other systems of animal communication; are some languages better than others; what's a dialect and how does it compare to a language; how do children acquire language, does our knowledge of language derive entirely from experience, or do humans come “hardwired” with certain innate capacities for language; how do languages develop and change over time? For practical reasons, English is the primary source of data and examples for the course for practical reasons as the lingua franca. Still, data from other languages are presented throughout the course, with special attention to Italian, other languages (aka "dialects") spoken in Italy, and languages spoken by the students in the course.

This course examines art from a cultural point of view. It is divided into two parts. The first part discusses art as a whole with a focus on particular aspects of art as historical, social, and cultural practice. The second part focuses on the main types of analysis of art and the work of art.