Sociology

In in this course, students learn how they can use their learning to make a difference. Working in collaboration with students from different disciplines, they tackle real-life complex challenges as they are faced by local communities. This is an experiential learning course where students get support and training to develop their skills in areas such as problem solving and critical data analysis, and use these skills together with their understanding of academic theories and methods to propose a solution to the challenge.

This course cultivates, through theoretical study, the necessary skills for working in child welfare. It covers fundamental concepts and values, history, policies, organizations, services and skills required in the field of child welfare. The course also provides the foundational knowledge of child and youth development, critical perspectives for analyzing child and youth related social problems, and the understanding of key issues related to child welfare policy and programs. It uses a comparative framework to evaluate the current state of major child and youth development problems and the policies and programs aimed to address them.

This course looks at the trends in the digital society: inequality, connectedness, big data, changing norms, loss of privacy, gamification, changing ways of producing and consuming new, and asks what are the implications for our everyday lives, and for the institutions and norms which shape how we live, of the increased connectedness of our age? Students explore the structure and features of digital technologies and social networks and their implications for collective behavior from economic, political and social perspectives.

This is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. In this course, students develop a critical understanding of global health policy as a historical, political and moral assemblage to deal with the consequences of global inequalities. They also gain an appreciation of illness and suffering as the personal embodiment of broader social processes within local moral worlds embedded in historically deep and geographically broad social dynamics.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Students selecting the Italian subject area must select the course readings in Italian. The course examines gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts with specific reference to the analyses of the notions of identity and otherness, difference, and diversity. The course favors the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, and visual). The course presents case studies in which texts (literary and visual) are in dialogue with theories and methodologies of gender and postcolonial studies. The texts elaborate on the issue of gender, identity, difference, race, and politics of the body in the representations, transmissions, and elaborations of traumatic events in literary and visual texts (with specific reference to utopian and dystopian fictions). Lessons make reference to memory and trauma studies, dystopia, and science fiction within a gender and postgender perspective. The course elaborates on debates on the intersectionality of gender(s) and race in theories, and visual and literary texts, and to analyze issues related to utopia/dystopia/science fiction within a postcolonial and posthuman perspective. The main theoretical issues discussed by the course include critical theories and methodologies of gender and women's studies and queer studies; re-reading of the notion of identity, difference, and diversity; gender as a social construction; women’s and postcolonial re-visions of the symbolic and social order; the construction of sexual difference as a deconstructive strategy; re-writings of the body; French Feminism(s) and African American and Postcolonial responses; postcolonial and African American critical debates on the representation and deconstruction of the notion of gender and race. New politics of identity and difference; intersectionality of race and gender(s); and the interconnection of gender, ethnicity, and race in trauma and memory studies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now widely used, usually in the form of machine learning, in a broad range of applications including finance, healthcare, law, and social care, as well as playing a role in the arts and humanities as a tool to explore culture. This course introduces students to the issues raised by the development and deployment of AI. The content focuses on providing information and raising debate about the known and predicted effects of artificial intelligence on culture and society.

The course provides a study of theories of human development and social functioning at the individual, family, small group, community, organizational, and societal levels, with application in explaining complex interactions between individuals and the social environment. The course covers human development in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, with respect to the developmental scientific knowledge base regarding opportunities and vulnerabilities present during the different stages of the life cycle and the biopsychosocial and cultural factors that can influence individual development—values, beliefs, worldviews, and identities.