Sociology

This course enables students to reflect on the role of information in shaping today’s society and information professions by learning about relevant social, societal, and ethical trends and perspectives, and to consider what information professionals and scholars can therefore do to affect, and hopefully improve, society. Possible course topics include core concepts values in library and information science, information and data ethics, fake news and censorship, surveillance and cybercrime, artificial intelligence, globalization, digital sovereignty and regulation, sustainability, and equity and diversity. Seminars consist of student presentations, discussion activities, and writing tutorials.

This course covers family behaviors from a life-course perspective and an ecological system perspective. It introduces recent and hot research topics of family studies and provides a historical review on how family behaviors and policies change with the development of a society. The course provides an overview of theories, empirical research, research design, and methods under family sociology. The course follows a topic-specific and a case-specific approach to explore the diversity of life experience in the family sphere and the determinants of family behaviors. Topics include dating and mate selection, cohabitation and marriage, sexual life, parenting, work and life balance, gender and domestic work, break-up and divorce, intergenerational relationship, family policies, et cetera.

This course examines both philosophical topics in human rights and the history and politics of human rights in Argentina, specifically during the military dictatorship and the democratic transition. Philosophical topics include: analysis of human rights, genocide, and torture; competing philosophical justifications; feminist theory and women's human rights. Historical topics include: a survey of Argentine political history; Argentine state violence; other social actors in the violation of human rights; the lexicon and discourse of violence and how they shaped the body politic; transitional justice; the role and morphology of collective memory; gender in human rights violations.

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes the students' research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in the USA.

This interdisciplinary course, which draws on social psychology, political and social theory, and sociology, explores what it is to live in a multicultural world where identities are in flux. The first part of the course introduces the main debates of one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary inquiry: multiculturalism, diversity, and gender. It explores how categories of difference (race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality) are complex and interrelated. It considers the theoretical underpinnings of multiculturalism to explore the normative as well as pragmatic arguments for and against it. The concept of culture is explored in depth by drawing on sociological studies that try to help better understand cultural differences. The course then considers the question of intercultural dialogue and how it can be used as a resource to facilitate communication between different cultural groups. The second part of the course considers actual cross-cultural case studies to explore how states have developed diverse policies related to cultural pluralism. It also explores how gender and other categories of difference interact with modern institutions in contemporary society. Throughout, the course analyzes various ways of looking at power and political culture in modern societies with the objective of developing the ability to think critically about mechanisms for change. Students read relevant texts from a wide diversity of literature. Each session focuses on a particular theme and includes a student presentation that communicates and argues persuasively one's viewpoint on a topic.

This course provides the conceptual tools needed to understand, analyze, and critically and constructively engage with ongoing societal transformations induced by climate change, biodiversity, and other ecological crises, colloquially known as green transition. It builds on scholarship and meso-level theories founded in environmental and climate sociology, branching also into other literatures to ask foundational questions about society-wide change towards sustainability: how much of it is currently happening across societal sectors, domains, and levels; how it has or is currently being brought about; and what shapes, conditions, or hampers more of it. The course begins by reviewing debates on two contrasting diagnoses: the risk society diagnosis of Ulrich Beck and the ecological modernization diagnosis of Maarten Hajer, John Dryzek, and others. At stake is the question of the place of environmental concern, policy, and practice in reworking (late) modernity. From here, the course delves into the main institutional vectors of green social change, covering in turn questions of socio-technical change (green technological innovation, changing infrastructures); political-economic change (shifting modes of governance and politics, new circular market models); mobilization-driven change (environmental social movements, urban green communities); changing North-South relations (new globalized inequalities, climate justice activism); everyday practice change (emerging consumptions habits, new social distinctions and divisions); and cultural value change (continuity and change in moral valuations of ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene). Throughout, the focus is on understanding present-day green social change in light of historical experience and meso-level sociological theory, with a view to taking stock of what near-future changes lie ahead. Alongside examining the various substantive dimensions of green transition, it also discusses adequate methodological strategies affiliated with the different problem complexes and vectors of social change. Throughout, students work on aligning analytical and methodological strategies via case analyses.