Upper Division
Upper level courses in sociology typically have a significant research component and require self-direction on the student's part. It is expected that students have some familiarity with basic sociological perspectives and methods. Students lacking this sociological background may need to do supplemental reading to get up to speed.
For the most up-to-date listing of when each course will be offered, please see the Courses by Term section
(Course Syllabus) (Cross-listed with ASCL 55.03)
Within the short quarter century run of the 21st century, the world has witnessed a global upwelling of insurgency. Southern Asian sites, including but not limited to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal have been fertile grounds for tens of millions of insurgent publics protesting against austerity, rising living costs, student debt, corrupt governments, police brutality, and government neglect during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who are these Southern Asian insurgent publics? How does South Asia reflect – or depart from – global patterns of insurgency and other forms of social protest? Do we need to theorize southern insurgency differently from those occurring in other parts of the world? Dist: SOC; Non-WCult: Upadhyay.
Is America in crisis? The nation is more deeply divided politically, economically, and ideologically than it has been for generations. Washington is in gridlock. Inequality and poverty have been rising. People have become polarized over racial, religious and social issues. Some say the politics of identity and self-interest have been unleashed at the expense of the nation's general welfare. Some disagree. This course explores these issues. It examines how political, economic and ideological power has been mobilized recently in the United States and with what consequences, including the conservative shift in American politics, the 2008 financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump, and possibly the decline of the United States as the world's superpower. The course draws on scholarly work in sociology, political science and economics.Dist: SOC; WCult: W.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with QSS 54)
Sociologists and other social scientists are often interested in understanding causal and dynamic social processes such as:
"How do the places we live, work, and play get under the skin and affect health and well-being across the life course?"
"Does upward social class mobility change one's political attitudes?"
"What social currents are responsible for changes in support for same-sex marriage across historical time?"
"Are long-standing racial inequalities declining, persisting, or increasing in recent years?"
Many of these questions are methodologically difficult to answer with observational (non-experimental) data, and they require that we get a handle on the study of change, context, and causality. You likely have learned how to answer questions like these with standard OLS (linear) regression techniques and cross-sectional data, which remain useful tools in social scientists' methodological toolbox. But these techniques are also quite limited, and impose strict assumptions that do not allow us to meet many of our goals, adequately answer our questions, or provide stringent tests of our theories and hypotheses.
In this course, we'll pick up where introductory statistics courses leave off, and get an introduction to more advanced statistical methods for observational data, including but not limited to: regression for categorical dependent variables, fixed and random effects models, and hierarchical linear modeling. This course will be a mix of seminar and lecture, where we will be focused on understanding how we can use these methods to better meet our goals and answer our research questions. Put differently, this course is less focused on going "under the hood" and more focused on "how to drive"—specifically, we will interrogate the assumptions and use of these statistical methods in the social sciences and learn how to implement these methods using STATA. This will include: discussion of core methodological assumptions and limitations, how to apply these statistical methods in different settings, and learning when specific methods are appropriate tools and when they are not. We will explore these issues through student-led discussions, hands-on data analysis, and dissecting the application of these methods in academic journal articles. As part of this course, you will be exposed to (and critique) a wide range of sociological research published in our major disciplinary journals. The course will culminate in an independent research project where students will analyze data and use the one or more of the modeling techniques discussed during the term to answer a sociological research question of their choosing. Prerequisites SOCY 10 or equivalent required. Students who received a MATH 010 credit from an AP score are strongly encouraged to reach out to the instructor prior to enrollment to ensure they are prepared. Dist: QDS. Houle.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with PBPL 81.05)
More than one in ten Americans lives in poverty according to official statistics. This course explores the nature and extent of poverty in the United States and the role of the government in addressing poverty issues. How do we measure poverty? Why does poverty persist? Why is there so little political discourse about poverty in America today? How effective are various poverty alleviation programs? Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Stockstill.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with WGSS 34.04)
What is gender? This seminar examines multiple sociological perspectives on what it means to be a woman, man, boy, or girl in everyday life - including gender as a social structure, an identity, an ideology, and something people "do." Readings and discussions reflect a belief that diversity (race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, etc.) is central to the study of gender. Possible topics include: language, the body, science, the wage gap, education, and masculinity during young adulthood. Dist: SOC. McCabe.
When does a person reach adulthood? Is adulthood reached when your frontal lobe matures, when you have a child, or simply when you feel mature? We will discuss competing scholarly perspectives on what adulthood means and learn how the transition to adulthood has changed since the 1960s. We will analyze how race, social class, and gender affect adulthood. Students will formulate their own ideas about adulthoods through informal writings, OpEds, and news analyses. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI. Stockstill.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with EDUC 24)
How are schools organized and how do they organize society? What effects do schools have on individuals and what effects do they have on society? Using sociological theories and methods, we will examine the structure of schools and their effects on individuals and society. We will explore both formal and informal education. This course will focus on inequalities, specifically how social class, race, gender, and sexuality both organize and are organized by educational environments. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. McCabe.
(Cross-listed with WGSS 66.34)
Intersectionality has become a prominent framework for understanding how social categories shape lived experiences. As an interpretative tool utilized across the social sciences and humanities, intersectionality interrogates how power is distributed along and across axes of inequality and privilege. Course readings, discussions, assignments, and assessments will focus on a wide range of social locations connected to race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion, language, and disability, while also accounting for the multiplicity, nuance, ambiguity, and contradictions in how these social identity markers intersect. Engaging both theoretical and empirical works, this course will examine how simultaneous and interdependent dynamics between axes of inequality impact identity formation and life chances, relationships of marginality and privilege, social continuity, social conflict, and social change. Additionally, this course will critically explore the challenges and advantages of intersectional analysis and the future of intersectionality's theoretical, methodological, and epistemological capacities. Dist:SOC; WCult:W. Allen.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with PBPL 84.05, WGSS 33.05)
The nature of work, family life, and gender relations has changed dramatically over the last half century. This course examines these trends, with a focus on implications for gender inequality in society. We will focus on patterns in paid labor force participation and family life in the United States, and discuss the major debates surrounding the causes and consequences of such trends. We will also pay attention to how these patterns look across different races, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic status, as well as briefly examine how these trends compare to other countries. We will conclude by exploring the implication of gender inequality for families, as well as work-family policy debates. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Smith.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with WGSS 33.07)
Why do you connect with some people and not others? What exactly is love? And how do you make smart, romantic choices for yourself? In this course, we examine the social aspects of love, romance, intimacy and dating. Using sociological theories and methods, we will investigate how cultural beliefs and structural arrangements affect our most intimate feelings and experiences. Specific topics include virginity loss, adolescent sexual behavior, hooking up, dating, intimacy and polyamory. Dist: SOC. Lively.
Most people think of emotions as a purely internal experience, composed solely of physiological elements. Recently, however, sociologists have begun to emphasize and explore the social side of emotion—for example, how emotions are shaped socially and culturally, how emotions are socially controlled, and the consequences of emotion for social life. We will examine these and other sociological aspects of emotional experience in this course, including exploring current debates about the social functions of emotions, especially as they pertain to the substantive areas of work and family. Topics include the social causes of emotion; cultural variations in feeling and expression norms (especially in regard to love and anger); changes in American norms over time; the shaping of children's emotions through socialization; individual and social techniques of emotion management; the social distribution of emotional experience; the social functions of emotion; emotional deviance; and the individual and social consequences of emotional display. Dist: SOC. Lively.
Sociological social psychology examines the relationship between individuals and the larger social systems in which they are embedded, including interactions, groups, institutions, and cultures. This course will use key social psychological concepts (e.g., status, power, stigma, justice, identity) to explore how inequality is created, reproduced, and resisted. We will study how inequality operates in different social and institutional contexts (e.g., work, family, schools), and for members of different social groups (e.g., race, class, gender, age). Dist: SOC. Rogers.
Prerequisite: Sociology 1 or Sociology 2.
What is money? How do people find jobs? Are markets competitive or cooperative? This course examines these and other questions about how economic behavior is organized, operates and changes historically. It recognizes that economic activity is socially organized and guided by political, cultural and normative as well as economic principles. It explores how economic activity takes many forms, including groups of small competitive firms, large and powerful corporations, and diffuse networks of companies tied together through inter-firm alliances, business associations and other sorts of cooperative and competitive relations with each other, unions, government agencies and universities. It examines the organization and operation of different kinds of markets, different theories of how economic activity is organized, and the social factors that contribute to economic success or failure. It also investigates how managers, unions, policy makers and governments are coping with recent economic challenges, such as those posed by technological change and the globalization of economic activity. Because this is a course in economic sociology-not economics-no background in economics is required. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Harrington.
This interdisciplinary course provides a critical approach to global urban studies, with a particular focus on race, migration, and the built environment. By scrutinizing sites of "globalization"—ships, railroads, ports, islands, plantations, canneries, slums, camps, museums, ghettos, cemeteries, infrastructures, archives—students will explore themes such as segregation, slave trade, anti-blackness, urban violence, settler colonialism, urban renewal, necropolitics, and environmental racism. The course will engage in a historical and postcolonial dialogue to offer students critical methods to "spatialize" intertwined histories of racial closure across continents. Dist: SOC or INT. Eom.
This course examines the political, cultural, and economic sources of solidarity and mobilization among workers in the US from the late 19th century to the present. Readings and discussion will focus on important historical developments among labor unions, from militant beginnings through an accommodationist phase after World War II and a deep decline, to recent attempts at revitalization. Students will consider the impacts of labor movements on social inequality, politics and on a range of cross-cutting issues around gender, immigration and race. We will conclude by examining the prospects for labor in light of the rapid and profound changes in the world of work and economic activity in the contemporary period. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Dixon.
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with AAAS 63)
What is race? What are the effects of race in our everyday life? How has science shaped our understanding of race and human diversity? This course explores how and why race is a social construction with profound implications in our social world not only in the U.S. but also beyond its shores. Diverse sciences have established that human beings are well over 99% genetically identical, but race remains a potent vision through division that has been made and made to matter across multiple spheres of life. This ranges from ancestry testing to our identities to how we are categorized to where we live and whom we are taught to love and hate in society. How race intersects with socioeconomic disparities related to inclusion and exclusion are among the topics examined in this course. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI. Keaton
This class will focus on interrogating the drivers of inequality in rural and small-town communities. To understand this, we critically examine several interconnected issues: culture, health, racial equity, education, environment, infrastructure, social services, economic justice, and geographic isolation. This course has an experiential learning component. Students will apply the concepts learned in class to real issues faced by an Upper Valley community partner, completing a research portfolio that includes a literature review and field research on a matter of concern for the organization. This community-engaged course is not only an opportunity to meet the needs of a community partner but also to learn from their existing assets and strengths. Students who wish to enroll in this course should have previously completed either Introduction to Sociology or Social Problems. This requirement may be waived for students who have taken certain other sociology courses; contact the instructor to find out if you are eligible. Distribs Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Walton
Just over a century ago, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that human history, culture and politics cannot be properly understood without taking fiscal events—such as taxation and state budgeting—into account. War, the development of industry, and of capitalism itself all stemmed, he claimed, from the evolution of a "tax state." From this insight, a century of research has emerged, spanning a wide range of fiscal activities by states, as well as by private actors.
This course will review key themes of this subfield of sociology through four empirical topics: the world of high finance, including the social coordination and networks involved in the trading of securities and commodities; social organization and consequences of financial fraud in a variety of domains, including currency counterfeiting; social history of taxation, including social movements stemming from tax revolts; and system of offshore finance as a mechanism for reproducing inequality and elites. Dist: SOC. Harrington
Professionals, Policy & Practice examines how professionals have come to be among the most influential actors in contemporary organizations and the global political economy. Professionals have long been the focus of research in organization and management studies, but interest in them crosses disciplinary boundaries; thus, the course will include readings from sociology, accounting, legal studies, finance, and political science. We'll draw on their varied theories, methods and approaches to examine how and why professionals coordinate and compete, shaping norms, standards and practices within and among organizations. Dist: SOC. Harrington
Just as conditions within our homes have important implications for our health, conditions in the neighborhoods surrounding our homes also can have major health effects. Social, economic, and environmental features of neighborhoods have been linked with mortality, general health status, disability, birth outcomes, chronic conditions, obesity, depression, injuries, violence, health behaviors and more. In this course, we consider whether and how the characteristics of neighborhoods shape the physical and mental health of individuals, and how neighborhoods contribute to persistent health disparities. Special attention will be devoted to conceptual and methodological challenges to detecting the prevalence and magnitude of 'neighborhood effects' on health. Dist: SOC. Sharp.
This course sets out to understand race and ethnicity as the product of, as well as a basis for, political struggles. The conventional sociological understanding of race and ethnicity focuses on difference. That is, although sociologists take pains to argue that racial and ethnic differences are socially constructed, the vast, long-standing inequality among racial and ethnic groups make it very tempting to perceive the status quo as inevitable, if not natural. In order to counter this trend, we have to center the concept of power and trace how racial and ethnic divisions came to emerge from the political struggles of the past. And in doing so, it is crucial to understand not only successes but also failures of white supremacy—namely that non-whites have always disrupted workings of the dominant system, sometimes through electoral politics and other times through direct action. Dist:SOC; WCult:W. Kim.
While statistics and quantitative data are increasingly becoming important components of our lives, the specific social processes through which they are engineered remain elusive to many of us. We learn math, statistics, and quantitative methods in classes, but most often those courses glance over the social contexts in which the technology of numbers was developed. In this course, we trace the development of statistics and quantitative analysis through modern times in an attempt to understand how they have been used and perceived in society. We also address recent controversies surrounding their implementation in businesses and government institutions, especially in relation to algorithmic decision making. In the process, we will establish that statistics and quantitative data are not just abstract, formal tools whose meanings are absolute and obvious, but that they are social constructs embedded in particular institutions, such as the state and market. While statistics and quantitative data are increasingly becoming important components of our lives, the specific social processes through which they are engineered remain elusive to many of us. We learn math, statistics, and quantitative methods in classes, but most often those courses glance over the social contexts in which the technology of numbers was developed. In this course, we trace the development of statistics and quantitative analysis through modern times in an attempt to understand how they have been used and perceived in society. We also address recent controversies surrounding their implementation in businesses and government institutions, especially in relation to algorithmic decision making. In the process, we will establish that statistics and quantitative data are not just abstract, formal tools whose meanings are absolute and obvious, but that they are social constructs embedded in particular institutions, such as the state and market. Dist:SOC. Kim.
This class explores racialized experiences and controversies that affect daily life in the United States. We use insights from sociology to analyze racial identity and public behavior. For example, why do many people of color often "code-switch" as they move from interacting with family and friends and into their workplace? Why are some Black people accustomed to giving "the nod" to other Black people they encounter in majority-white spaces? Why are many Asian-Americans told that they "speak really good English" something social scientists would call a microaggression)? We explore these issues and other controversial topics including interracial dating, neighborhood, gentrification, whiteness, and colorism. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI. Stockstill.
Not currently offered
Licit and illicit drugs make illuminating case studies for our economic and political systems. We explore the following questions: Are profit motives and humanitarian concerns in irresolvable conflict? Does the international network of illegal drugs show the future of globalization? Does pharmaceutical lobbying demonstrate the anti-democratic influence of money? Is the "war on drugs" political demagoguery or a rational response to human weakness? Dist:SOC; WCult:W
Not currently offered
Can social life exist without bodies? How can attention to the body influence our understanding of social processes of subjectivity, interaction, and practice? While the body has long been an "absent presence" in sociology, multiple approaches to theorizing and researching the body have emerged in recent decades. A sociological approach to the body and embodiment provides an opportunity to bridge the gap between everyday experience and analyses of broad social structures which can seem disconnected from daily life. In this course, we will examine the processes by which individual bodies are shaped by and, in turn, shape social life. Key questions to be explored include: how are bodies regulated by social forces; how do individuals perform the body and how does interactional context influence this performance; what is the meaning of the body in social life; and is there a "right" body? Dist: SOC.
This course will introduce you to recent social science contributions to the subject of neo-nationalism and radical right-wing activism. Beginning with terminology, historical context and methodological approaches, we will proceed to an analysis of recent socio-political developments, focusing on the interrelationship between radical right-wing activism and other social phenomena. We will interrogate the reasons behind the appeal of the far right, inquiring into various socio-economic contexts, the role of historical narratives in shaping far-right activism, and the "mainstreaming" of far-right ideas. An overarching question for all these discussions will be that of the agency and motivations of the actors involved.
We will draw cases from numerous contexts around the world and will reflect on similar developments on the political left. The course will allow for discussion of the most recent developments, as experienced by class attendees and reported by mass media. Finally, we will discuss ethical aspects of studying right-wing (and, for that matter, any political) radicalism. Dist:INT or SOC; WCult:CI. Pasieka
(course syllabus) (Cross-listed with GOVT 20.13, PBPL 29)
The purpose of this course is to explore economic growth as a broader human phenomenon. From being an unprecedented achievement with the Industrial Revolution, growth gradually became a policy lever for addressing a multitude of social and political objectives in the rich world, as well as a vital imperative for less developed countries. All the while, it never ceased to be a source of public controversy. What forces prevented the discovery of growth for so long? What factors bring it into being where and when it does emerge? What effects does growth have on those who experience it in a sustained way? Why has such a breakthrough so regularly drawn such passionate criticism and resistance? Above all, how might a study of growth and its critics prepare us for the policy debates of the future? Dist:INT or SOC. Clark.
All terms: Arrange
By permission of a Sociology Faculty member PRIOR to registration.
This course offers the qualified student an opportunity to pursue a subject of special interest, under the direction of a faculty adviser assigned to the student for periodic (usually weekly) conferences. Ordinarily at least one formal paper embodying the results of the reading or research is required. In special situations students may work as a team on a single project. Occasionally credit may be given in Sociology 80 for a research project done in an off-campus term, provided arrangements are made well in advance and adequate off-campus supervision can be assured. Although every effort will be made to accommodate qualified students desiring to carry an independent study, there is no guarantee that independent study can be arranged for any given student in any given term, and preference is given to senior and junior Sociology majors. Normally no student may take Sociology 80 more than twice during the undergraduate career.