Sociology

This course examines the history of sexuality from the Ancient world, through the 18th and 19th centuries, ending up in the twentieth century.

This course looks at some fundamental questions about the purposes of education. This course teaches students to think about the idea that schools are central in reproducing and reinforcing inequalities, such as those associated with social class, race, and gender. This course considers the paradox between the emancipatory aspirations of education and the practical disparities in its outcomes. This course also addresses a series of issues which animate current educational debate in the UK, such as selection by "ability" in grammar schools and universities, the notion of lifelong learning and continual personal development, and the educational "problem" of white working-class boys.

This course addresses the call for the provincialization of Europe and the West, the decolonization of science, and the indigenization of national or regional social sciences. It covers the history of sociology from the mid-19th century onwards, including new insights into the hidden development of Southern sociology and a more critical vision about how the canonization at play in sociology still excludes minorities, women, and Southern sociologists.

This course investigates how and the extent to which economic actions and outcomes are socially shaped, if not determined. It first covers a series of theoretical materials that argue for the so-called structural or relational “embeddedness” perspective and then moves on to discuss a wide variety of empirical examples, especially those related to network analysis. The course pays close attention to some of the key underlying assumptions regarding individual decision-making processes. More specifically, the focus is on the ways in which social networks (broadly defined) surrounding human actors affect the ways in which they think and behave and how this process ultimately creates and reinforces economic inequality.

From the patriotic tunes of the inter-war mandatory period to the underground music of the Arab Uprisings, Middle Eastern and North African popular music is deeply entangled with politics. Since the late nineteenth century, states and various social groups have attempted to channel the power of patriotic hymns and subversive songs. This course draws on the sociology and anthropology of culture to revisit the history of the region through music. It looks beyond periods of political upheaval to understand the everyday significance of musical practices in authoritarian, neoliberal, and postcolonial settings. Whether we understand it as a tightly knit web of meaning or as a soundwave that travels around and beyond the Middle East, popular music – its production, circulation, and consumption— tells a larger story about the making and remaking of identities and power relations in modern nation-states in the region.