Sociology

This course examines Hong Kong’s culture and its people from an anthropological perspective. Through close readings of ethnographies, viewing of videos, and fieldtrips, the class explores the interaction of different cultural flows in various social systems, and learns about the linkage between the past and the present, the local and the global, and the Chinese and the rest. 

This course reviews the fundamental theories associated with the spaciality of rural areas.  The class focuses on the pressing issues faced by people within rural areas, especially farmers within Mexico and Latin America.  It also covers a detailed explanation of how agricultural markets function in terms of productivity and values.  Last, the course evaluates the impacts of industrialization and technological advancements of agricultural economies.

The course will introduce Olympic movement and the related controversies and views from the perspective of culture In broad sense, analyze the relationship between Olympic culture and human and social development, politics, economy and world peace as well as the environmental protection. 

Course objectives It is intended that through the course students can learn and acquire the values and the positive character traits that are assumed to be developed in sport and Olympic Movement; to examine closely all aspects of the modern Olympic Games and Olympism in order to offer a comprehensive understanding of two key aspects of the Modern Olympic Culture: its historical developments and its present fundamental characteristics; the nature of the tensions created in the process of its evolution which have led to recent reforms.

This course examines various collective strategies adopted to selectively know and understand inhumane conduct and consider how publics morally disengage from acts of extreme violence and rationalize inhumane conduct, especially during periods of upheaval social unrest. It asks if social and political under-reactions to widespread evidence of violence, hunger, poverty, or ecological destruction today offer us any insights into the relationship between knowledge of suffering (its production and dissemination), social relations among humans, and propensity to act? Using classical Marxist and Weberian analysis, it will explore how social and affective identification with fellow humanity is routinely blocked. It will also assess the role of narrative in establishing the acceptability and coherence of certain violent realities today. The second part of this course considers occasions when societies choose to engage with traumatic memories of violence. Topics include collective trauma, denial, forgetting, societal guilt, inhumanities, the by-stander society, alienation, and societal learning.

This course examines classical and current debates in the discipline, through both theoretical and empirical scholarship. The class begins with a chronicle of the valorization of work over time and the development of capitalism, before covering the changes in the workforce with the onset of neoliberalism worldwide. Other topics covered include gender discrimination, unions, and relations between workers and employers, with a specific focus on Mexico.

This course focuses on concepts and contents of human rights. It examines international, regional and national conventions and legislations on human rights with specific reference to the rights of vulnerable populations. Additionally, the course reviews Ghana's compliance with human rights laws.

This course examines issues around drug use, supply, and associated criminal behavior from a social and subcultural perspective, understanding how some people's drug use is disproportionately framed as 'problematic.' It explores different frameworks and approaches to governing drug use and rehabilitation around the globe, as well as the future of drugs in our society by understanding how technology, media, and globalization shape the changing drug markets. 

This course seeks a methodology for geographical description and research on the state scale of the Mexican territory and, particularly, for the study of the classic fields of physical analysis of its geographical space. The course seeks to answer the questions: How does one analyze the territorial configuration of the Mexican State from the physical elements of the geographical space? What are the particularities of the physical elements of this territory? What are the problems that have currently arisen around its use and exploitation? What historical processes have influenced this and what disputes are expressed in this territorial configuration? And what are the main sources of consultation to study it?

The course begins with a reflection on the elements traditionally considered as starting points for the study of the geography of modern territorial States, and where the processes, subjects and factors that determine it and the factors from different scales are also identified. By the end of this section, participants will then have a theoretical-methodological framework that will allow them to focus on the more specific analysis of the physical elements of the geographical space of Mexico, valuing them and identifying the particularity that each of these geographical elements has in the historical configuration of the country. The second part of the course then analzes eight central elements in the production of the Mexican territorial State namely: orography, minerals, climate, soil, vegetation, continental water, hydrocarbons and maritime space. and insular; analyzing its geographical distribution, historical production and current problems.

This course familiarizes students with some of the debates about the nature of sex and gender as they have evolved since the publishing of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In this book, Beauvoir famously argued that, while women may be born the members of a distinct sex, “one is not born, but becomes a woman.” In its wake, the book’s readers were left to grapple with the question of the meaning and significance of this bold assertion. This course seeks to answer the following questions: To what extent do anatomy and biology determine one’s disposition or sexual orientation? Can we talk about “normal” female or male behavior? Is it advantageous to define women in opposition to men? How does sex relate to sexuality? Is there such a thing as sexuality to begin with?   

What is the state’s final frontier? How and why have governments around the world been vested with the authority to manage the most intimate aspects of our existence: from the food we eat to our sexual behavior? What has the impact of this encroachment been on our sense of self? Engaging with these questions from an historical perspective provides a critical lens for re-evaluating our own relationship to society and the state, as well as furnishing a context for considering the extent to which we are ever fundamentally “free” to possess our own bodies. Exploring the birth of “surveillance society” enables us to reflect upon – and challenge – the inherited assumptions which underpin our reliance on government and our aspirations for personal autonomy. This course ranges from the formation of the modern state in Europe and the techonologies it developed for managing populations, to global health surveillance and recent biomedical advances which have resulted in progressively interventionist governmental measures, with profound social, political and ethical implications. Topics include: surveillance; “medical police” and state-sponsored interventions in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe; the invention of the “population” as a collective body; colonialism and the global exportation of ideas about what is “normal”; “healthy citizens”: the coercive state and the democratization of society; and, finally, the limits of public health in the twenty-first century.