Sociology

Introduction to Sociology This course provides an introduction to the discipline of sociology, its core concepts, theoretical frameworks, and objects of investigation. It also seeks to emphasize how traditional sociological questions have increasingly become the objects of interdisciplinary inquiry and how, as a consequence, our understanding of the social world is enriched by scholarship that persistently and regularly crosses disciplinary borders. The class begins by exploring the basic tenets of microsociology and social control: how our lives, relationships, and activities are coordinated in relation to various matrices of authority. The remainder of the course is organized into three broad explorations of how race, sex, and class serve as organizing devices of our lives, whether at the level of personal, even intimate, experience, as well as the much larger structures of existence that shape the environments within which we live.

Immigration and the Racial State While the United States has long prided itself as a “nation of immigrants,” the issue of immigration has, at best, been an ambivalent feature of the national imagination, frequently associated with fears of national decline via racial and cultural pollution, unfair economic competition, and military invasion. This course examines the history of immigration to the United States in an effort to understand the contending forces that have shaped immigration policies and the experiences of immigrant communities. Particular attention will be given to Asian immigration, both past and present, as a point of departure for examining the mutual constitution of national and immigrant identities vis-à-vis institutions designed to protect the nation’s well-being. We will also examine the development of early 20th-century sociological theorizing, especially as it impinges upon contemporary understandings of immigration and the United States as a “multicultural” society. Prerequisite: At least two Social Studies courses.

Cultural Perspectives
Sociology of Race and Mixed Race This course is organized around the coexistence of very different images and assumptions about sex, specifically reproductive sex across ethnic and racial lines: while often identified as a site of liberation and resistance, where interracial sexuality is welcomed as a sign of enlightened color-blindness, it is simultaneously identified as enacting and reinforcing racial and sexual stereotypes and relations of dominance. The less than spectacular shift in interracial marriage (currently at 2.5 percent), 40 years after the celebrated Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia declaring anti-miscegenation legislation unconstitutional, suggests that “liberatory” and “repressive” models of sexuality are not up to the task of explaining interracial sexual behavior. Hence, rather than defining interracial sexuality as “good” or “bad,” this course examines how sex— and sexual reproduction—is intimately linked with questions of power, and explores various historical and contemporary manifestations of this relationship. Topics to be covered include: slavery and the so-called “one-drop rule”; antimiscegenation legislation; military conflict, rape, war babies, and war brides; gender, marriage, immigration, and citizenship; sex tours and Internet mail-order brides; transnational adoption. Prerequisites: One previous Social Studies class.

Social Control: Beyond the Gallows and the Matrix This course examines the processes involved in constituting the boundaries—and identities—that define social forms considered normal, acceptable, good, healthy, moral, and/ or natural against those considered deviant, crazy, bad, sick, evil and/or abominable. It will provide a critical overview of social scientific perspectives in the study of ab/normality and the specific methods by which the normal and the abnormal have been apprehended and addressed. The course is, in other words, concerned with the etiology and evolution of “deviant” categories as much as it is concerned with the material transformations in prevailing mechanisms of social control. This is obviously a theoretical enterprise, but also a moral and political one, as it explores basic conceptions of civility and the “good life”—as well as the liberal value of “freedom”—in relation to behaviors deemed problematic and the mechanisms developed to deal with them (e.g., death at the stake, incarceration, excommunication, psychotropic medication, therapy). Prerequisites: Sophomore standing and at least two Social Studies classes, or permission of the instructor.

Sociology Tutorial Under these course numbers, juniors and seniors design tutorials to meet their particular interests and programmatic needs. A student should see the prospective tutor to define an area of mutual interest to pursue either individually or in a small group. A student may register for no more than one tutorial in any semester.