Sociology

This course introduces students to political sociology which is broadly concerned with understanding such phenomena as power, state and society relations, and the nature and consequences of social conflict. The main topics are issues pertaining to modern society and capitalist development, referring to diverse cases from Western Europe to Southeast Asia. Students also examine the state, civil society and societal movements, including that of labor, and such contentious contemporary issues as economic globalization, US global hegemony, and terrorism.

This course examines the relationship between society and the built environment, using a sociological perspective to analyze the city and urban phenomena. It discusses the main theoretical contributions and lines of research that have facilitated the interpretation and analysis of various social problems in the urban context.

This intermediate level course reviews the main theoretical considerations of cultural constructs, stressing the relevance of the role of otherness and the dimensions of intersectionality. The course starts from a critical and current analysis of identity in order to seek proposals for dialogue and peace policies aimed at building a cosmopolitan vision of the human being. 

This course does not require prior knowledge or experience. It is desirable however that those who are interested in taking it, show curiosity for intercultural dialogue, critical thinking and the development of capacities around collaborative learning.  

Working with the local community, this course builds on the communication and leadership skills necessary to lead action for social change. This practical work is facilitated by the charity Citizens UK, who match students with local campaigns or voluntary organizations. Exploring issues that impact various communities, students find links between their discipline and ways in which ‘community work’ can be undertaken. In workshops, students  engage critically with current debates about social justice, analyze historical and contemporary campaigns, and build practical skills (storytelling, negotiation, and delivering leadership speeches) to make positive social change.

This course introduces students to important theoretical tools and conceptual frameworks developed in the social sciences. Students use these tools to uncover the economic, political, and other forces that shape the design process, explore how values and norms are built into technologies, track the effects of technologies on society, and use these insights to experiment with, and hopefully improve, design practices and outcomes. The goal is to enable social scientific reflection on and redirection of design practices at an early stage of technological production. The course focuses on important social scientific concepts, for example ‘network’ and ‘audience,’ each of which will be covered in two phases. First, students study and evaluate key social scientific ideas that explain the social dimensions of technological design through readings, class discussions, and written assignments. Second, students use those concepts to make experimental interventions, for example through archival research or fieldwork, video and image-based documentation, and creative experiments with design, in an effort to “design for a better world.”

This course introduces various population theories, concepts and facts to develop a critical understanding of the inter-relatedness of the demographic, social, cultural, economic and political issues between Hong Kong and Mainland China and its sustainable development.

The media plays an extremely influential role in the public’s conceptions of crime and order. This course is designed to look at the different ways in which the media shapes our ideas and responses to crime. The course is divided into two main sections. The first half of the course examines representations of crime in different media forms and theoretical explanations for why crime is portrayed in particular ways. The second half of the course focuses on the representation of crime in popular culture, particularly in films and novels.

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.