Global Arc

Online platforms, which monitor and intervene in the lives of billions of people, routinely host thousands of experiments to evaluate policies, test products, and contribute to theory in the social sciences. Field experiments are also powerful tools for monitoring discrimination and governing human and machine behavior. In this hands-on undergraduate class, students will develop practical experimentation skills, engaging with methods, theory, ethics, and politics of large-scale behavioral research online. For a final project, student teams will develop, conduct, and report on a novel experiment together with an online community or platform.

This course introduces core concepts and tools for analyzing spatial data. Students will gain hands-on experience creating spatial data (e.g., geocoding and merging data sources), producing and interpreting maps, and describing and analyzing spatial patterns and relationships. Drawing on examples in housing, health, education, public policy, and urban studies, students will learn how to apply spatial reasoning in the empirical analysis of social phenomenon and use spatial methods to answer questions about the geographic distribution of social problems, the organization of communities, and the relationship between society and the environment.

From soap dispensers that don't see dark skin, to facial recognition tools that misidentify black faces, scholars and citizens have documented how the devices and tools we use compound inequalities in society. This Princeton Challenge intervenes in this trend by asking what would it look like to build explicitly anti-racist systems? Students will work in teams to design, build and test systems that embrace anti-racism as a core value, drawing on sociology of race, technology, and Human-Computer Interaction, and scholarship on anti-racism. Students from all sectors of campus, with or without technical backgrounds welcome.

This seminar will examine social implications of the American food system as it developed during the twentieth century by delving into topics that range from gender, race, and labor to the construction of supermarkets, development of industrial meat production, and the increasing use of biotechnology in food production.

Sociology as a discipline was not institutionalized until the early 20th century, but sociological thinking predates the discipline by at least a century. In this course, we examine the development of social thought through the writings of sociology's founders as they developed the idea of the social and its relationship to the development of the individual and to economic and political transformation. While the course lingers on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, it also explores their intellectual contexts, their interlocutors and their legacies up through the middle of the 20th century.