Sociology

This course takes discourses on popular culture as its point of departure to discuss the cultural meaning and reverberation of popular culture today. As a dominant cultural phenomenon and force, popular culture has infiltrated into our everyday life and helped shape our identity and worldview. Within the critical tradition on popular culture, there has been a heated debate with regard to the pros and cons of popular culture in terms of cultural politics: to what extent is popular culture reinforcing the dominant stereotypes of gender, sexuality, race, and class? And to what extent can popular culture subvert or even intervene dominant cultural hegemony? This course provides an opportunity to look into how popular culture is constructed and appropriated in tandem with its potential to disrupt practices of dominant cultural hegemony. Key texts on popular culture are read closely, and students will be encouraged to investigate practices of contemporary popular culture that are of interest to them. To make students familiar with key concepts of popular culture and cultivate the ability to analyze forms of contemporary popular culture with a critical perspective.

This course delves into the sociological-historical contexts of non-institutionalized ideologies at the inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary crossroads of eastern and western religious, philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses in modern western cultures. It focuses on alternative beliefs and practices of eastern and western charismatic leaders and new religious movements—popularly referred to as "spiritual teachers" or "gurus" and "cults"—in Europe and North America, after 1800. This includes Ralph Waldo Emerson's American Transcendentalism, Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy, Phineas Quimby's New Thought, Vivekananda's Neo-Hinduism, D.T. Suzuki's Neo-Buddhism, Inayat Khan's Neo-Sufism, Count Keyserling's Darmstadt School, C.G. Jung's Eranos Circle and various New Age movements. Students critically reflect on such alternative quests for meaning outside conventional sciences and religions. In doing so, they learn more about post-Enlightenment responses to the "age of reason," post-colonial encounters between eastern and western traditions in a globalizing world, and post-modern blends of methods and theories from different academic and societal domains, which have culminated in a growing cultic milieu of seekers across modern western cultures. Seekers are individuals who collectively identify as spiritual, but not religious. During this course, students reflect on questions such as: Why have so many seekers in modern western cultures turned away from conventional western religions and sciences? Why are they turning to eastern and alternative western traditions instead? How are they selectively combining eastern and western methods and theories into new sources of meaning? What combinations have we seen in the recent past and which ones do we see around today?

This course critically examines advertising, exploring its effects on our notions of society and self within the context of larger economic, social, political, and global shifts. Beginning with an overview of the development of advertising, the course introduces a methodological framework for understanding how advertisements create meaning, and then explores how such meanings interact with, and impact upon, the culture at large.

This course offers students an opportunity to examine how environmental politics are played out within society. Students examine the intersection of environmental concerns, power relations, advocacy, and activism. The study of advocacy and activism campaigns and case studies focus on mapping the evolution of a controversy, teasing out the distinctions between advocacy and activism, analysing the role of popular culture, managing social and traditional media, and identifying successful interventions that have an impact on environmental policy and decision making processes. Key questions explored during the course include: How do citizens make sense of and respond to initiatives that have potentially damaging consequences for society?; How do science, business and activists attempt to persuade?; How are power relations invoked, challenged and negated within environmental advocacy and activist campaigns?; and What role does popular culture play in creating and sustaining particular valuing systems and cultures?

This course covers some of the most pressing social inequality issues as they relate to welfare and health. By focusing on European societies, the course compares and contrasts social inequality patterns, as well as societal and policy responses to social inequality. Questions posed in this course include: How do various societies respond to enduring, growing, or changing inequalities? Do these challenges lead to an erosion of solidarity, in an 'us versus them' rhetoric? When and why do people stand up for social justice (or not)? And to what extent are we accepting of social inequality? Taking a sociological, psychological, and political philosophical approach to these topics, this course offers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding social inequality and the societal as well as social policy responses in contemporary Europe.

This course provides a sociological analysis of the evolution and transformation of modern societies, based on various theories and interpretations of social change. It examines both specific and general theories of social change and social action; characteristics of historical sociology and in particular, problems encountered with compared methodologies applied in the study and explanation of social change; and the processes of social change, including concepts of social evolution, social movements and revolutions, the impacts of modernization.

This is a research internship course offered by Rothberg International School. The course's availability is subject to the availability of suitable academic supervision. Students work in a preapproved organization or research institute for a minimum of 8 hours a week (not including transportation) for a total of 88 hours throughout the semester. Students complete a mid-semester meeting including a report submitted to the Internship Coordinator, time sheets, a one-page reflection summarizing the experience, and a portfolio/research paper. Students are assessed on their hours, reflection and work description assignment, and their portfolio/research paper.

This course focuses on the French art of strolling aimlessly through the city from the late 19th century to present. Exploring the intersection between the city walker and the urban environments navigated on foot, this course provides a unique perspective on the role of public space in the construction of urban modernity in France. The course adopts an explicitly class-, race-, and gender-critical approach to the study of this able-bodied practice that has traditionally been associated with a certain Baudelairean archetype of bourgeois masculinity. The course investigates who has the right to linger and be seen in public space, how the act of strolling aimlessly through the city intersects with other forms of societal privilege, and when and where wandering becomes a means of protest or resistance. By tracing the itineraries and embodied geographies that are traversed in this practice, this course creates a map of social mobility and urban modernity in the ever-evolving French city.