Sociology

This course provides students with a comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural policy – what it is, what motivates it, how it is made, what consequences it produces, and most importantly why it matters for students as future artists, creatives, and citizens. While helping students learn about state policies in the broader cultural sector, the course actively uses international and comparative materials to help them to develop global problem-solving skills. The focus of the course is on key aims and values of cultural policy, such as national identity, nurturing creation, public value, public accessibility, and cultural diversity.

This course interrogates the intersection of environmental studies with ethical and political theories of justice. It engages with issues of environmental justice and injustice on a global scale and provides special consideration to the intersecting dimensions of race, ethnicity, class, and gender as well as global economic inequality and settler colonialism. An important dimension of the course is learning about the understandings of environment and claims to justice mobilized by social movements seeking to address environmental injustice. Beginning with an introduction to theories of environment, justice, and scientific knowledge production and continuing with an investigation of themes in environmental in/justice, the course considers how capital flows and the distribution of power shape who has access to the necessities of life and to clean environments and who does not, and how the world itself is being radically altered by human action. Finally, it considers what ethical and political obligations humans may have to more-than-human beings, and how the struggle to protect these beings is often tied up with the social justice struggles of marginalized human groups. The course continually returns to the question of how plural understandings of justice and the environment underwrite or challenge environmental destruction and socio-economic inequality and examines the social movements locally and globally that are challenging and, in some cases, transforming such inequality. Through readings, in-class discussions, guest lectures, selected films and documentaries, and a final project, students reflect critically on the root causes of the uneven distribution of the basic resources necessary for life.

This course examines history, law and culture in the social, political and economic context of Hong Kong and China in the 19th and 20th centuries. It covers historical narratives, legal systems, social customs and cultures of Hong Kong and China.

Animals figure in human society and culture in multiple ways, while frequently being marginalized or reduced to commodities, production units, status symbols, and tools. This course offers a critical exploration of how a shifting economic, scientific, political, and media-shaped landscape assigns various roles and values to animals in contemporary Western society and the consequences for the living conditions of animals and humans alike. The course integrates innovative critical animal studies research from a range of areas such as sociology, media and communication studies, philosophy, cultural studies, geography, gender studies, and critical race studies.

This course analyzes the forms in which contemporary narratives construct social imaginaries that contribute to the development of identities and perspectives, as well as discussing contemporary narrative theories. 

This course examines culture and justice, including what culture is and how we know, and how justice is understood and how it is demanded, pursued, and meted out (by whom, for whom, to whom).