Sociology

Health communication is becoming increasingly important in a world faced with new health challenges from obesity to Ebola, anxiety to diabetes. This course considers the role of language in our experience of and beliefs about health and illness. Students learn how health communication differs among various communities, both monolingual and multilingual, from the grassroots level, such as in families, to broader groups, for example, between health professionals and patients. It also considers the effects of social diversity, such as the age, gender, and ethnicity of patients and healthcare professionals. Students become proficient in analyzing a range of relevant uses of language, including narratives about health and illness, the representation of health and illness in the media, computer-mediated communication about illness, and public health information, persuasion and campaigns.

This course provides a basic but comprehensive introduction to some of the intellectual traditions within sociology with a focus on the origins of the discipline. The course provides the student with the necessary conceptual tools to understand the distinctive origin and nature of sociology as an academic discipline and as a wider cultural presence within modernity. In all cases emphasis is placed upon the specific historical context of particular writers and theories. The argument is that the emergence of sociology and the social sciences in general represents an intellectual response to the cultural and material problems of capitalist industrial societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The course equips students with the concepts and information necessary to grasp the main themes of the classical sociological tradition.

This course offers an examination of the nature of work in capitalist societies. The first half of the course builds a picture of the development of contemporary, global capitalism. The course make sense of the nature of capitalism, and its periods of transformation, through looking at institutions, culture and periods of crisis. In the second half of the course, the course turns to an examination of work. Work is presented as a highly pervasive institution, structuring life experience within and beyond the workplace. Observing the nature of work over time also reveals transformations in the operation of power in the workplace, in the way work is organized, and in the cultural values typically attached to work. The course presents these changes, and explains them via the large-scale structural aspects of capitalism covered in the first half of the course. In this way, students can connect macro-level social theory with micro-level depictions of life experience, and thus see how capitalism matters for our everyday lives.

This course brings together frameworks and methods from multiple disciplines to think about crisis, a hegemonic and deeply polyvalent concept. Using seminal ideas from queer, trans, and cultural theory, students consider how moments of crisis are often rife with contradictions and ambivalences and how the language of crisis has become ubiquitous in the contemporary world. Students also discuss seminar theories that situate crisis as endemic to capitalism, and think about how we might think about crisis as ordinary rather than exceptional. Throughout the course, students work through myriad texts and disciplines to consider the notions of crisis and catastrophe, and use different examples to research how crises often unfold in drastically different ways. Topics may include climate change, migration, epidemics and pandemics, moral panics around trans rights and bodies, and settler colonialism.

This course introduces the key questions, issues, and tools necessary to conduct qualitative research. It guides students through devising a research question, choosing appropriate research epistemologies, ethical implications, selecting appropriate methods of data collection and analysis, and writing a research proposal. Students learn the key techniques of qualitative sociological inquiry including interviews, focus groups, content and discourse analysis, archival research, participatory and action research, and various forms of ethnographic research. It further introduces relevant qualitative data analysis and research software, in addition to examining the analysis, writing, and reporting of qualitative research.

This course examines the multifaceted impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on contemporary society, exploring the intersection of AI's evolution with social issues such as personal identity, social relationships, privacy, surveillance, political order, the public sphere, mediatization, platformization, the attention economy, digital labor, and social polarization. Rather than uncritically embracing technology or relying on simple technological determinism, the course emphasizes the mutual shaping of AI and society.  

The course focuses on how AI creates new media environments and how individuals and communities adapt to, negotiate, and resist these changes. Students formulate critical and creative research questions suited to the AI era by engaging with diverse social theories and applying them to real-world cases. Students engage in in-depth discussions about the intricate relationship between AI and society and develop their own critical perspectives and research projects.  

Topics include AI-mediated social relationships, Interacting with AI, AI and privacy, AI and mediatization, AI and platform dependency, AI and surveillance, AI and disinformation, AI and attention economy, AI and digital labor, AI and social polarization.  

This course provides you with an introduction to the philosophical issues in social research. Students look at ethics in social research and theory, quantitative versus qualitative methods, sampling, observation, interviewing, media analysis, and questionnaire design. Students are given the opportunity to work through the research process on a topic of independent study of your choosing.

This course explores the concept of physical activity and the importance of encouraging people to move more and sit less as part of health promotion efforts. Students examine measuring movement behaviors to equip students with the ability to judge data based on how it was obtained. Students identify and analyze various factors that impact how much or little people move. This includes looking into the psychology of physical activity, environmental assessments, and policy enquiries. Insights allow students to design an intervention that can improve movement behaviors. Students can gain tangible knowledge and skills for assessing, understanding, and changing movement behaviors across diverse populations.

The course provides an introduction to theoretical, historical, and contemporary debates around race, racism, and empire. It covers the following thematic areas: history; theory; experience; futurism. Students begin by exploring the historical events and contemporary afterlives that have created a world structured by racism and colonialism. From the Enlightenment to nationalism; from science to secularism, students look at how this world came to be, and why these often-hidden histories matter. The course then looks at different ways people have tried to understand this world. Theoretical paradigms include anticolonial theory, the Black Radical Tradition, Queer theory, Trans* theory, and postcolonial theory, decoloniality and settler colonialism, among others. The third block looks at the everyday experiences of race and empire. The course looks at the politics around tourism, climate change, technology, intimacy, movement and food, and the course ends with a discussion about abolition as a means of imagining a future free of racism.

This course engages key sociological issues through the critical reading of theoretical and analytical texts. Students engages with advanced concepts in sociological thought, and explores the connections between theoretical arguments and the practice of social enquiry and analysis. Students read a combination of social theory texts in a range of traditions as well as contemporary research studies.