Sociology

This course examines the idea that the contemporary production of urban space restricts the rights of many urban dwellers to inhabit, develop, and otherwise shape the cities in which they live and work. Drawing especially on the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre (alongside other "metromarxists") the course contrasts the way that cities serve the interests of financial powers, developers, and property owners with the forms of urban exclusion, alienation, and marginalization experienced by those who are oppressed by virtue of their class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or gender. Though consideration of different struggles for urban space, the course explores important questions about how people should make claims to urban space, and explores the political potential of the demand for "the right to the city."

This course focuses on the social, societal, and political issues of today's French society through song, cinema, press, questions of identity, secularism, and cultures in France.

This course examines current environmental and climate change movements in Europe and the United States, including their background and their significance. At the same time, it utilizes these movements as a lens to understand the politics of climate change and social movements more generally. Specifically, this course investigates the main political ideas driving environmental and climate activism; analyzes the main features, forms, developments, and challenges of environmental and climate activism; discerns their impact and relevance in sustainability politics today; and introduces an understanding of social movements as key drivers of social change. The course provides a thorough understanding of climate and environmental activism: its origins, pathways, and diversity, as well as its relevance for sustainability politics in general. Through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on research and theories of social movement studies and environmental politics from several of the social sciences, there is an empirical focus on Europe and the United States, as well as links with other continents and global politics.

This course provides students with an introduction to central themes and concepts in Sociology, and applies them to particular cases. Students learn what is distinctive about a sociological imagination of contemporary and historical concerns and helps them see how our individual lives are connected to global developments such as climate change, migration, and the advancement of digital technology. Students are also introduced to how class, gender, race, identity, and religion organize relations in an era of globalization.