First Year Seminars
We currently offer four first-year seminars in sociology: 20th Century Revolutions, Emotion and Culture, U.S. Social Stratification, and Race and Ethnicity. Each first-year seminar is intended to help students see similarities between reading academic scholarship and producing it. Through class discussion and small group work, students will develop their capacity to think critically, conduct research, and write within the field of sociology.
Sociological writing requires students to critically survey the existing literature, develop research questions, discuss methodology and produce results. By the end of the first-year seminar in sociology, students will be able to:
*effectively analyze the social factors shaping individual experiences;
*perform critical readings of assigned works;
*offer compelling oral arguments in class discussion;
*write in a style consistent with expectations of the discipline of sociology; and,
*evaluate and revise their own and others' writing.
FS: Managing Emotions from the Outside In
Drawing on insights from sociology to psychotherapy, this is an interdisciplinary course on managing one's emotions. The purpose will be to 1) examine how social norms and cultural expectations tell us we should feel, 2) investigate the consequences of adhering to these norms, and 3) better understand why particular strategies related to mindfulness and therapy work. Students will produce common writing assignments (e.g., experiential essays, critical reflection, library research papers, peer review, etc.) encountered social science classes and develop a stronger appreciation of how emotion operates in both the external and internal world.
FS: Race and Ethnicity: Social Constructions and Social Realities
In this course we start from the premise that racial and ethnic distinctions are a social construction. Students will explore how race matters by interpreting their own identity and experiences through the lens of a social scientist, examining interpersonal and institutional forms of racism and their consequences, and discover prospects for change in the future. Students are required to interpret class readings, perform short critical writing responses, evaluate others' work, facilitate and participate in class discussion, and write one 5-7 page essay, and one 8-10 page research paper. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Walton.
FS: Inequality in America
When we think about social inequality, it's tempting to view it as the inevitable byproduct of effort, where those at the top are rewarded for their perseverance, and those at the bottom should work harder to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." In this class, we will interrogate these naïve assumptions, and explore sociological understandings of social stratification and inequality in the context of 20th and 21st century United States. We will focus on a range of topics, including (but not limited to): social mobility, poverty and social welfare policies, stratification by race and gender, the causes and consequences of rising wealth and income inequality, and the changing face of inequality before and after the Great Recession. Dist: SOC. Houle.