Class Schedules

The course introduces students to the sociological imagination, or "the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individual and society, of biography and history, of self and the world," as C. Wright Mills described it. The enduring value of a sociological imagination is to help students situate peoples' lives and important events in broader social contexts by understanding how political, economic, and cultural forces constitute social life. Sociology explores minute aspects of social life (microsociology) as well as global social processes and structures (macrosociology). Topics covered vary from semester to semester, but may include: socialization, suburbanization and housing, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class stratification, deviance and crime, economic and global inequality, families and intimate relationships, education, religion, and globalization.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The course introduces students to the sociological imagination, or "the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individual and society, of biography and history, of self and the world," as C. Wright Mills described it. The enduring value of a sociological imagination is to help students situate peoples' lives and important events in broader social contexts by understanding how political, economic, and cultural forces constitute social life. Sociology explores minute aspects of social life (microsociology) as well as global social processes and structures (macrosociology). Topics covered vary from semester to semester, but may include: socialization, suburbanization and housing, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class stratification, deviance and crime, economic and global inequality, families and intimate relationships, education, religion, and globalization.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Most people in wealthy societies today spend a decade or more time in schools even though their experiences may differ greatly. Schools hold out promises of individual development, upward mobility and societal advancement. And yet schools also are frequently at the center of debates over curriculum, inequalities or health. This course introduces students to the field of sociology of education by focusing on the links between schools and society. We explore the various theoretical views on schooling, examine the social forces shaping modern schooling, and review its relations with individuals and society. We will also focus on selected topics related to contemporary educational debates.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course has no prerequisites: Why is it in the United States controversial or seen as difficult to advocate for justice for Palestinians? Why are so many justice activists often accused of Antisemitism when advocating for Palestinians or criticizing the action of the Israeli state or zionism? Why is advocating to end occupation or settler-colonialism in Palestinian Occupied Territories often silenced in major American institutions while discussions of the Ukraine-Russian war or Apartheid in other contexts are permitted? Why do professors close their office doors when discussing Palestinian rights on campuses? Why is mainstream American media unwilling to use the “G” word when discussing what is happening today in Gaza where over a million of Palestinians are in the process of being displaced and tens of thousands are being killed, most of whom are children, women, and civilians? This course will try to answer these questions and more. It will also cover some basic history of the conflict from the rise of zionism and Palestinian resistance to the growing American-Jewish dissenting voices. We will read key scholarly articles and books by Palestinians and others as well as include excellent documentaries. We will also invite a number of speakers to talk in class.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In 2019, according to the International Organization for Migration, the United States had the largest foreign-born population in the world. During this same year, immigrants represented 15% of the United States population; 53% of the foreign-born migrants came from Latin America. Immigrant Voices in Times of Fear will examine recent U.S. immigration from a sociological viewpoint. That means we will consider migration as part of a global phenomenon, as the outcome of historical processes, and as a part of lived experiences. The course will include consideration of how immigration relates to social institutions such as the family, the nation-state, and work. We will also learn about different immigration policies—including those before and after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Services Act (commonly known as the Hart-Celler Act), which eliminated the quota system to prioritize family reunification, employment, and refugee status. While we will become familiar with immigration policies, we will pay attention to the experiences of young (unaccompanied) migrants from Latin America and how they navigate the (deportation) immigration system in the U.S. We will explore questions such as: What motivates people to migrate? How does migration reconfigure social relations, such as parental and community relations? How do immigrants adapt to the new country? How are immigrants received by the larger society? This discussion-based course includes guest speakers and a community engagement project with a local organization.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces students to comparative and historical methods used in the social sciences, most prominently but by no means exclusively in sociology and political science. Comparative-historical researchers use huge comparisons to understand big structures and large processes that have immense importance for social life. The course addresses questions such as: How do social scientists gather and analyze evidence about macrosocial phenomena? What types of logic guide the definition and selection of cases? In addition, we learn about analytical choices facing comparative-historical researchers, including different methods of comparison and analysis of historical evidence. Beyond reading and discussing material about comparative-historical methods, we will analyze examples of research and apply lessons we learn to gain more familiarity with using comparative-historical methods.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores how sex and gender as categories of knowledge and being have been culturally formed and socially negotiated within colonial structures. Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing from perspectives such as sociology, history, feminist and queer of color critique, geography, legal studies, and cultural studies, the content delves into the role of gender and sexuality in shaping both imperial governance and relations of exploitation. Organized into three distinct periods, the course traces the transformation of sexual and gender ideologies amidst shifting colonial landscapes: firstly, the emergence of domestic ideals alongside racial state formations in the 19th century; secondly, the development of gendered ideologies within colonial settings during the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and finally, the enduring impact of colonial constructions of gender and sexuality on post-colonial discourse and action. Additionally making the case that late 19th century imperialism and late 20th century globalization are related political economic processes, the course investigates gender and sexuality at this point of globalization as derived from an imperial inheritance, considering what this means for us in the present. Throughout the course, students will critically examine topics such as the feminization of labor, neoliberal policies, the nexus of war and torture, the carceral state, immigration dynamics, environmental justice, and transnational feminist movements. Special attention will be given to the ways othered gendered and sexual subjects have challenged and resisted globalization and empire, offering insights into forms of resistance and refusal.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Although we often think of mental health individually, how we experience and understand mental distress is powerfully shaped by the world we live in. In this course we will: explore how mental illness definitions and labels are shaped by historical and cultural contexts; consider how the distribution of mental suffering in society is shaped by access to power and resources; examine how social relationships contribute to our mental health; assess how political and social forces shape how we organize and provide mental health care; and examine how social movements shift how we understand and respond to mental health concerns. Throughout we will consider how sociological research calls into question dominant views of mental health and illness.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This class focuses on the relationship between families and larger social institutions, including governments, economic institutions, and labor markets. This course also explores how various societal forces shape relationships within contemporary American families, as well as considering other historical forms and understandings of the family.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This senior seminar serves as the capstone experience for sociology majors. This class provides students with an opportunity to develop a synthetic understanding of their sociology course work and to conduct prospective research that may culminate in honors projects.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The Far Right in the United States has appropriated working class identities to produce an identity among the white working class. Donald Trump, for instance, intentionally portrays a large gap in highbrow and lowbrow to take jabs at privileged liberals (such as when he tweeted the "Hamberder" photo). This course observes what can be called the Far Right "theater of politics" in order to understand how liberals have left working class culture behind in ways that allowed the far right to fill the void by finding persuasive techniques in culture (country music, religion, church...) to articulate a political voice that some working class folks, especially whites, may find appealing. Some of the major questions of the course include: (1) How do political and economic elites produce class, gender, and racial divides and segmentations by aligning themselves with the cultural practices often associated with working class folks? (2) Can the left create a political culture that cultivates respect for organic cultural expressions that include religious expressions and pop-cultural themes like country music and sports (yes, even football!) into their fold  Reducing everything to class and asking all others to submit to its political logic is a limited vision. Instead, the course investigates whether it is possible to envision a political project that rather than privileging the concerns of upper-middle class whites produces a culture of resistance that can articulate working class subjects - straight, queer, white, black, binary, non-binary - into a populist left movement? One of the truly powerful features of the Left is that it is much more diverse than the Far Right. Is it possible to extend that diversity even further so that it can show a "little respect" for organic cultural producers to feel comfortable producing and living in multiple class, racial, gender, and sexual habitus?

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores historical and contemporary perspectives on racial and ethnic groups in American society, including African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, European Americans, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent. The goal is to develop an understanding of socio-historical forces that have shaped the lives of racial and ethnic groups in America.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Social scientists have many methodological approaches to choose from in their research toolkit ranging from qualitative to quantitative to comparative historical. Each of these approaches allows us to see and understand society from different perspectives, sometimes offering us complementary snapshots and other times presenting us with contradictory information. How, then, can we engage evidence to make claims about the social world? What even counts as evidence and who gets to speak for whom? Social Science Inquiry is part of a methods training sequence that emphasizes quantitative social science inquiry-that is, the approach to social science research that entails statistically analyzing relatively large datasets and emphasizes concerns such as measurement, replicability, objectivity, generalizability, and causal inference. However, this methodological approach is not without its critics. Therefore, this course begins by being in conversation with quantitative social science's critics, examining the abuse of quantitative knowledge in social science research and how quantitative social scientists have themselves been complicit in building many of the tools now at the center of contemporary ethical debates over online privacy, digitization, facial recognition, AI, and their use in policing, surveillance, and border enforcement. Taking the stance that quantitative methods are tools with the capacity to either build up or break down social structures, we will work with municipal data from the City of Minneapolis to explore how quantitative methods may be, in sociologist Ruha Benjamin's words, "retooled" to serve emancipatory and abolitionist purposes. Readings will focus on case studies from social science research and critical texts from science and technology studies. Methods-training content will specifically entail the use of R and will cover inferring population characteristics from survey samples, estimating causality and predicting outcomes using linear regression, the principles of probability and estimating statistical uncertainty, and how to critically read quantitative information presented via figures and tables.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Quantitative Thinking Q3

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course is designed to engage students with the most sophisticated and useful schools of thought available in the social science disciplines. The course raises a number of questions: How can we best understand the complexities of self and society? Are these units of analysis useful in and of themselves? Are they contained in an essential body or polity that we can identify as some unitary entity called Jenny and John Doe, American, French, Arab/Jew, black/white, modern/primitive, developed/underdeveloped, Oriental/ Occidental, homo/heterosexual, male/female? Or are they socially produced units that have no essence in-of-themselves, produced and made real only through performance with the "Other"? Furthermore, is there something unique about modernity that has fundamentally transformed the notions of our selves, bodies, polities, races, and civilizations? If the answer to the last question is in the affirmative, how and why did this come to be the case, and what consequences does it hold for our understanding of the past and of the future? These are the kinds of questions that great figures in sociology have been asking since the nineteenth-century, including classic theorists like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, as well as more recent writers such as Ervin Goffman, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Edward Said.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

During the last three decades, a global indigenous rights movement has taken shape within the United nations and other international bodies, challenging and reformulating international law and global cultural understandings of indigenous rights. The recognition of indigenous peoples' rights in international law invokes the tensions between sovereignty and human rights, but also challenges the dominant international understandings of both principles. In this course, we examine indigenous peoples' movements by placing them in a global context and sociologically informed theoretical framework. By beginning with a set of influential theoretical statements from social science, we will then use indigenous peoples' movements as case studies to examine the extent to which these theoretical perspectives explain and are challenged by case studies. We will then analyze various aspects of indigenous peoples' movements and the extent to which these aspects of the movement are shaped by global processes.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course delves into the topic of suburbanization, exploring a wide range of themes and issues that have converged in the suburbs as arguably the most important spatial form of the 20th century for observing major shifts in American culture, politics, and economic activity. Broadly, we will study the complex and multifaceted relationship between suburbs and cities, analyzing the theoretical underpinnings that have shaped the dynamic between them. Additionally, we will explore: the allure and deceit of the American Dream, scrutinizing how this ideal has been both a driving force and a source of disillusionment for many suburbanites; the spatial and possessive logics of whiteness, examining how suburbanization has been intimately tied to the construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies; and the political importance of the suburban homeowner as a voting bloc, looking into how this group has wielded significant influence in local, state, and national elections. Moreover, through decoding suburban architecture and its surrounding built environment, we will also think through the gendered, sexual, and social control functions of the single-family home, the highway, and the shopping mall as normalizing structures designed to regulate and shape our behavior and values. Finally, thinking critically about what it means to participate in placemaking within these broader themes, we will close by theorizing together about the significance of rejecting the “cruel optimism” of the suburbs amidst the recapture of city centers by the forces of financial capital. What does it mean to be in place and in community in a world where space has become increasingly territorialized, privatized, and hoarded?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Differently positioned groups and individuals in society experience and understand historical occurrences from distinct vantage points. What becomes the accepted account of what has transpired in our collective lives? How do we as a society remember and make sense of the past? What types of knowledge get produced when only certain accounts of history make their way into official repositories? How is the past ordered and tamed in the service of maintaining systems of domination, exploitation, and perverse forms of inclusion? These questions orient us toward the study of “collective memory,” a concept coined by early sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1925 to refer to how memory becomes socially significant once taken up in a collective context. With a focus on placing the United States in global perspective, we will examine material such as video testimonies, museum displays, archival collections, public monuments, and news coverage to consider the relationship between power and knowledge, the place of history in contemporary political struggles, and the role of technology in historical preservation. Moreover, this course emphasizes how collective memory is also an ongoing project and practice that holds the capacity for transformative social change. Taking a community-engaged approach, we will close by considering the possible futures available to us if we reckon with the past and engage in critical-creative heritage practices in the present.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Law is omnipresent in contemporary social life. How should we understand this development and its consequences? How does law operate to the advantage or disadvantage of various members of society? Can law be the source of significant social change? This course examines the development of a formal, legal system and the ways in which such a system connects to other parts of society. We begin by focusing on individual experiences and understandings of law and what these tell us about how law fits into the larger social order. We then evaluate explanations about the connections between social and legal development. We also consider how the "law in action" operates by examining empirical studies of legal institutions and the limits and potential of law as a source for social change.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Feminism means both understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in society and challenging the oppressive structures that constrain people of all genders. This class will focus on feminisms (theory and praxis) in the Americas, their histories, politics of liberation and resistance, struggles, and transnational collaborations and solidarity from the 2000s onwards. We will pay particular attention to their fight against gender-based violence. We will engage with memoirs, academic scholarship, and activist production. We will read Brenny Mendoza, Sara Ahmed, Rita Segato, Ochi Curiel, María Lugones, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, among others. The central questions we will address are: What constitutes transnational feminism(s)? How do members of communities in the Americas understand and articulate their relationships to feminism and feminist organizing? How do activists in specific cultural contexts resist multiple forms of gender-based violence?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials