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.