Global Arc

Sexuality is fundamental to the organization of society -- both in the U.S. and across the world. Though sexuality carries important personal significance, the understanding of why and how it influences our lives is inextricably woven into a complex, global fabric. The aim of this course is to unravel this fabric and reveal the deeply globalized nature of sexuality in the modern era and how this shapes understandings of sexuality, the sexual identities available to us, and how the state regulates it -- especially from a global, comparative perspective.

This course investigates poverty in America in historical and contemporary perspective. We will explore central aspects of poverty, including low-wage work and joblessness, housing and neighborhoods, crime and punishment, and survival and protest. Along the way, we will examine the cause and consequences of poverty; study the lived experience of severe deprivation and material hardship; evaluate large-scale anti-poverty programs with an eye toward what worked and what didn¿t; and engage with normative debates about the right to housing, living wages, just punishment, and other matters pertaining to American life below the poverty line.

A survey of past and present perspectives on the origin, development and social consequences of capitalism, covering various aspects including classical political economy and sociology theories, long-term cycles, revolutions, state actors, the welfare state, imperialism, international trade, international finance, labor relations, consumerism, ecology, neoliberalism and the future of capitalism.

In this course, students will develop a broad understanding of how Japanese society functions today by focusing on several key institutions and social domains: politics, the economy, education, employment, family, media, and the larger population. This understanding of contemporary Japanese society (1980s-present) will come through reading of Japan scholars in a range of fields, reading recent media portrayals of Japan, attending lectures designed to supplement and extend the readings, engaging in classroom discussion based on student-generated questions, and writing a research paper on a topic of student's choice.

This course seeks to expose students to the recent social science literature on contemporary immigration of black individuals from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa to the United States. In addition to gaining an understanding of the degree of diversity that exists within the black immigrant population, students will explore the long-term effects of contemporary black immigration on American society, with a particular focus on understanding the roles of race, selective migration, and culture in explaining disparate social outcomes between U.S.-born and foreign-born blacks in the United States.

This course seeks to expose students to the recent social science literature on contemporary immigration to the United States, its origins, adaptation patterns, and long-term effects on American society. The course will consist of lectures by the instructor combined with class discussion of assigned texts.

Students will be introduced to the practice of doing ethnographic fieldwork in the local community and to the reflective process of writing ethnography. Students will select a local field site within reach of their daily lives, engage in fieldwork and participant observation, write field notes, experiment with interpreting their data and discover their research question. In the readings and in class discussions we will talk about social explanation and interpretation, and focus on field notes and the process of writing ethnography. Field notes will be turned in weekly. A final paper based on field research is due at the end of the semester.

Introduction to social exclusion in modern Latin America. This course examines the historical development and structural roots of social exclusion in Latin America as well as demands for inclusion and government and civil society responses. Forms of social exclusion include those based on class, race, ethnicity and gender. The course emphasizes the context of democratization and neoliberalism in the region and a social environment of high income inequality and crime.

This course takes a sociological approach to examining and analyzing the "startup" from different units and levels of analysis and how these levels interact in early stages of organizational development, growth, and survival. We also cover topics like gender and inequality in organizations, firm culture, organizational power and politics, leadership, networks, and entrepreneurship in developing economies. The course combines lecture and seminar along with some group activities and guest speakers with extensive experience in entrepreneurship and early stage investing/advising.

This discussion-based seminar introduces students to the basic concepts sociologists use to study social movements. Readings focus on social movements that have shaped US society and politics in the 20th and 21st century. We examine several cases of social movements that are relevant to today's America, with the goal of using the concepts we have gleaned from earlier readings to understand some of the clashing forces that are driving social change right now.