Sociology

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. 

History—both the actual physical materials that help historians establish a timeline of events of the past and the imaginings contemporaries have of those events—is a crucial part of feminist and gay rights activism. This course analyzes feminist organizing in the U.K. and gay rights organizing in the U.S. from two perspectives. First, it delves into specific historical moments that have created significant cultural and political reverberations, such the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp from 1981. Second, it examines how those events and others become parts of the storytelling used by the feminist and gay rights movements as tools to advance their demands in specific national contexts. From this dual articulation, the seminar examines the relationship between the past and the present as well as the stakes that this reciprocity has for advancing or hindering social progress. Students engage in independent and original research as they learn to engage in historical archival research and think about these issues from the perspective of apprentice scholars.