Global Arc

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.

Can or should finance be organized differently to distribute power, status, and financial rewards more equitably and address economic inequality? Explores private equity firms that share wealth with workers, broad-based profit sharing and employee share ownership in corporations, the Alaska Permanent Fund, mutual stock and bond funds engaging in socially responsible investments, citizens owning robots to address technological unemployment, establishing investment accounts for each newborn baby to help achieve their social goals, and more democratic reforms of boards of directors in corporate governance. Examines pro and con arguments.

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.

What do voter turnout, the civil rights movement, the Paris Commune and suicide missions have in common? Conventional as well as unconventional politics rely on the purposive participation of individuals and groups on the basis of their shared, partisan views of what society ought to be. We will discuss the building blocks of political action such as identity and interest, social networks and influence, power and ideology, to understand topics such as electoral behavior, civic engagement, collective action and social movements. Combining theory and empirical research, the course is intended to inspire your own research in political sociology.

Formal organizations are basic building blocks of modern societies. We are born in organizations, educated in them, and spend our working lives navigating them. The first half of this course examines why organizations look and act the way they do. Why are they so bureaucratic? How do they influence one another? How do they evolve? The second half of the course focuses on the consequences of organizational practices. How do they shape work, inequality and diversity? How do they mediate the effects of public policies? Examples will be drawn from an array of sites including firms, schools, non-profits, hospitals, and social movements

Environmental refugees leave their homes in response to earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, toxins, dams, and deforestation. Risk-mitigating farming households preemptively send family to seek jobs elsewhere, protecting against possible crop failure. In much of the world, households participate in cyclical or temporary migratory flows, driven by seasonality of the food supply. Students will become familiar with the manners in which environment drives migration and explore the potential for migration to impact the environment. Is vulnerability to environmental hazards distributed equitably across the world's communities?

Using detailed studies of four major centers (San Antonio, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York), this course will analyze the historical and contemporary experience of several Spanish-speaking populations. Discussion will focus on two questions: (a) Are there common experiences or characteristics that justify the categorization of these varied groups under a single ethnicity? and (b) What racial, class, and gender divisions exist within these groups? Two lectures, one preceptorial.