Sociology

This course examines Korean popular culture and its related issues in historical and sociocultural contexts. For this examination, the course surveys a history of Korean popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on forms of media culture (popular music, cinema, and TV dramas/shows) that has not only led to but developed through Korean Wave both within and outside of Korea. Also, the course delves into a variety of phenomena and issues in Korean popular culture in conjunction with contemporary Korean society. The course then aims to critically and analytically discuss the ramification of Korean popular culture and Korean Wave in the global, local, and glocal perspectives.

This course describes and further elaborates on specific social problems in the Czech Republic, exploring the historical context that generated them as well as critically discuss their impact on Czech society in comparison to other countries. The course also examines the interrelation of certain social issues and pays special attention to social exclusion and inequalities, exploring them in more detail through case studies. The overall theme of the course is to understand people's engagement in changing the society, primarily through their participation in non-governmental organizations and community initiatives. Students are invited to share their personal experiences in order to raise awareness. This course also serves as an interesting insight into the Czech culture and society from an unusual perspective.

The course covers key aspects such as website analysis, game design, and avatar interactions. Students learn to measure and analyze digital engagement via metrics and analysis and to understand and evaluate ethical and privacy issues. They attend a series of lectures from world-renowned scientists to get a deeper understanding of how the algorithms behind digital engagement work and what data they use. They identify approaches to maximize the effectiveness of media engagement in areas such as immersive games, and social media, and evaluate case studies with respect to digital engagement usability and effectiveness.

This course introduces the sub-discipline of economic sociology and discusses how this field is related both to other branches of sociology and to economics. It introduces core concepts and approaches in contemporary economic sociology, particularly sociological perspectives on markets, money, and the social embeddedness of these phenomena. The course also analyzes various types of social and economic phenomena by means of economic sociological concepts and theories. It is structured around the reading of Mark Granovetter’s SOCIETY AND ECONOMY: FRAMEWORK AND PRINCIPLES (2017), which in an exemplary fashion rehearses many of the key concepts in contemporary economic sociology. The readings are supplemented with research papers that exemplify some of the issues dealt with in the book as well as additional concepts and perspectives in economic sociology. In parallel with the reading of course literature, students develop an economic sociological analysis of a case of their own choosing, applying and discussing core concepts in economic sociology.

This course exposes undergraduate students to the fundamentals of qualitative and quantitative research methods in sociology. It discusses conceptualization; operationalization; variables; hypotheses, and sampling. The course also covers types of research as well as fundamentals of qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

This course explores literary criticism and theory in Latin America and the theoretical foundations and critical and methodological contributions proposed for the study of Latin American literature. Topics include: Latin American literature in the 19th century and the problem of the formation of literature-- originality, independence, and nation; the professionalization of critical practice-- between tradition and modernity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and originality and dependence; theory and criticism of the testimony genre-- the problem of genres in literary theory, forms and types of testimony, subject and voices in testimony, and fiction in testimony.