Sociology

This course is driven by very simple questions. What is gender? Does gender have only two categories as a man and woman? Or do we have another category? Sexual minorities have been growing in many countries as a worldwide debate ensues over their rights. The difficulty of legalization for same-sex marriage or prejudice and discrimination for sexual minorities remain around the world.

In Samoan culture, a “Third Gender” category exists for a biological man who considers himself as a woman. However, people of Samoa strongly insist that Samoan ways of “Third Gender” are not the same as “gay” or “transgender” as they are understood in the West.  Through reading Margaret Mead’s “Coming Age of Samoa,” this course addresses these inquiries and their differences. 

This course offers a broad understanding of current-day processes of resource competition and provides key conceptual building blocks to analyze its dynamics and outcomes. How resource competition is conceptualized informs the direction in which we look for solutions. The course examines resource competition in terms of 'new enclosures', stressing resource capture by powerful actors at the expense of less powerful users. It pays attention to the interplay of power and politics, the law, and violence. Students discuss several theoretical approaches to resource competition, most importantly: political ecology, legal anthropology, and conflict studies. The course discusses current approaches to address resource conflict and prevent ‘grabbing’, such as due diligence, land rights registration, and civil society advocacy. 

This course explores the ways in which music operates as a means of challenging, disrupting, and resisting the social order. It encourages students to reflect on the relationship between art, power, and resistance by critically engaging with a wide range of "protest" songs. To this end, the course critically analyses specific pieces of music through the application of a wide range of conceptual tools drawn from critical, decolonial, race, and feminist theories. It intends to advance students’ sociological imagination by fostering the awareness of the value of the "aesthetic dimension" as a means of dissensus, with a particular emphasis on the theme of social change.
 

Countering organized crime has been accorded high priority by many states and intergovernmental bodies, however, the concept is ill-defined and often subject to clichéd, analytically weak discourse. This course reframes the debate to think in terms of how serious crimes are organized. Students analyze the nature and organization of criminal activities (i.e., the crime commission process) such as modern slavery, drug trafficking, alcohol counterfeiting, and money laundering.

This course examines literary texts and films to explore different themes and topics related to Chilean culture and politics. It discusses Chilean films and literary texts from the late 1960's to the early 2020's in order to better understand and contextualize some of the main events and discourses that have characterized Chilean society during the past fifty years.

This course is an introduction to the study of religion in the social sciences. It examines what people do with religion and what religion does to people. The guiding thread of this course is to investigate how “religion” itself as a category is debated and contested, what counts as religion, and who gets to decide. The course is divided into three parts. The first part explores the definitions of religion that have been provided by classical authors. The second part analyzes the intersections of religion with other social categories such as class, gender, and race. The third part interrogates the politics of religion and how States, international organizations, political actors, and citizens grapple with religion, seek to regulate it, or use it to further political ends. The course is interdisciplinary and exposes students to various approaches of religion rooted in political science, sociology, history, and anthropology. It provides the theoretical and methodological tools to best appraise the place of religion in contemporary societies and discuss such complex and debated issues as secularism, fundamentalism, religious freedom, and religious discrimination.

This course examines the ambivalent role of digital technologies in our societies and questions our future by questioning their relevance. It first considers where we come from and how the pre-web world prepared us for this new reality, notably through science fiction. It then invites us to understand what is happening in our daily lives by deciphering the announced technological advances and their effects on reality. Finally, the course imagines a horizon that seems most desirable for all.

This course is concerned with introducing students to theories and concepts in sociology, and their application. Students are introduced to classical and contemporary social theories. They cover the works of the "founding fathers" of continental European sociology, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, as well as more contemporary social theory including functionalism and symbolic interactionism. 

This course introduces economic, political, cultural, religious, gender, and other dynamics of Taiwan’s society. The primary goal is to bring about an in-depth understanding of the contending forces that are constantly remaking Taiwan. While the focus is on the present, some historical topics are included for a grip on the preceding transformations in the postwar era. A survey on contemporary Taiwan’s society necessarily sensitizes us to the complicated nature of social groupings. Differences in ethnicity, class, gender, region, age, sexual orientation, religious belief, and lifestyle give rise to highly diversified cultural expressions, among which contention and cooperation co-exist.

This course examines questions such as whether gender matters on the internet; how patriarchy, misogyny, and racism get coded into our digital tools; and if a feminist internet is possible. It engages with feminist scholarship from sociology, communication, and technology studies to discuss key theories about the relationship between technology, power, and gender and consider how they are applied to describe various digital pursuits – from Instagram influencer labor to Google searches to data visualizations. The course investigates how feminist theory makes sense of our digital and technologically mediated world. The last third of the course pivots to reviewing feminism put into practice by communities of technologists, designers, and data scientists.