Sociology and Anthropology

A one-semester introduction to the principles of sociological analysis. Through a critical examination of selected topics and themes, this course develops a sociological perspective for the interpretation and understanding of cultural differences, age and sex roles, discrimination, the family and the workplace, bureaucracies, stratification, and the problems of poverty.

Enrollment limited to 1st and 2nd year students only

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

An examination of 1) the emergence of race in modern societies, with special emphasis on the North American context; 2) the role of race in shaping power dynamics in the US historically; 3) contemporary consequences of racial power dynamics in the US today.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

Examines American class structures,processes and the unequal distribution of resources, as well as aspects of institutionalization that contribute to such inequality. Course focuses on the various social, economic, and political indicators of an individual's position in society, including occupation, income, wealth, prestige, and power, as well as characteristics of life at different levels of the class hierarchy.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

In this course, we will conduct an intensive analysis of the lower levels of the socioeconomic status hierarchy in the U.S. Overall, we seek to understand the ways in which a person's place in the social system is related to personal growth and development, especially for those who are less fortunate. Our study is rooted in Mills' notion of the "sociological imagination," in that we will analyze the structures influencing personal experiences and interpersonal dynamics. In other words, we go beyond individual-level explanations in order to identify and analyze systemic issues. We will begin with an overview of poverty and proceed to the contributions of the classical theorists, Marx and Weber, to the study of socioeconomic status (SES). We will also review some of the early history of poverty and policy in the 20th century. In addition, we include gender and race/ethnicity, two aspects of the social structure that can influence the consequences of poverty for the individual. Further, we examine poverty in institutional settings, especially the family, the economy, education, and health care. Finally, our study will investigate the low end of the status hierarchy, looking at those who are working but poor, those who depend on assistance for a minimal subsistence, and those who are homeless. We will go beyond issues of numbers and trends to try to understand the structural roots of the problem and what it means to have no place of one's own.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Spring

This course asks what it means to be a good citizen, good consumer, and good corporation in light of contemporary social and environmental problems by focusing on the relationship between democracy and capitalism. It investigates the complexities of understanding and implementing social responsibility on the local, national, and global level.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course examines how laws embedded in the US criminal justice system exclude vast segments of the population from full citizenship rights by criminalizing the actions (and very existence) of people of color. Tracing the historical development of criminal policies targeting people of color while largely ignoring white collar criminals, students will encounter a wide range of topics related to policing, criminalization, and mass incarceration, their consequences for individuals, communities and racial inequality, and contemporary social movements seeking racial justice in these areas.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

An introduction to the sociological study of deviance, this course explores 1) key theoretical perspectives to deviance and social control, 2) how people come to view certain attitudes, conditions, and behaviors as odd, morally reprehensible, or illegal and 3) the identities and life chances of people who are labeled as "deviant." Pays close attention to the relationship between deviance, power and social inequality. One unit.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

Social change is a key subfield within the discipline of sociology. In this course, we will attend to three distinct but interrelated forces that contribute to the process of social change. These include the structural tensions that accumulate within a society, the efforts of those in power to maintain and extend their position, and the self-activity of oppressed people seeking to improve their condition. Focusing primarily on the latter forces, we will explore the process of social change as it has been elaborated by the authors of manifestos from Classical Antiquity to the present. As works that are at once analytic and prescriptive, manifestos provide a snapshot of (and have sometimes even helped to prompt) periods of significant social changelike the fall of monarchies and the growth of new movements against inequality. Following the conventions of the manifesto, we will focus on how opportunities for change are identified, how collective actors are constituted, and how the tasks assigned to these actors are conceived in relation to both objective conditions and to other players in the social field. Combining lectures, comparative analyses, and interactive dialogue, this course requires careful reading, active participation, and ongoing reflection. By the end of the semester, you will have composed a manifesto of your own.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

As global responses to Black Lives Matter make clear, the struggle to end racism is not unique to the United States. This course will examine movements to end racism, racial violence, discrimination and structural disparity around the world. Issues of concern include memory, identity, justice, rights, social repair and politics, among others. Movements for justice include the Roma in Europe, indigenous and Afro-descent peoples in Latin America, the Dalits in India and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

An introduction "doing sociology," this class covers the logic and techniques of social scientific research. Readings, lectures, and exercises are designed to help students experience the field and develop methodological skills first-hand. Students will learn how to conceptualize, operationalize and conduct sociological research projects, including constructing research questions, understanding the intersection between theory and data, composing questions and guides for both qualitative and quantitative studies, as well as collecting, entering, and analyzing data and reporting empirical findings.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101 and SOCL 226. This course is for SOCL majors only.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Annually

Students are introduced to both descriptive and inferential statistics (including confidence intervals, chi square, multivariate analysis of variance, and multiple regression). The (mis)use and interpretation of statistics is heavily stressed.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101. Students who have taken BIOL 275, ECON 249, MATH 220 or PSYC 200 may not enroll in this course. This course is for SOCL majors only.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Mathematical Science

Typically Offered: Annually

The course is divided into three major parts. In the first, we explore the historical context that informs modern inequities. In the second, we explore different mechanisms of violence. In the final component, we explore forms of protest, resistance and strategies for change. This course also invites you to explore social issues you are deeply passionate about. We will use this course to reflect on personal activism and the ability to impact change.

GPA units: 1

This course examines the interaction between human society and the natural environment, more specifically, the relationships between various environmental and social problems, as well as emphasizes current theory and research in environmental sociology aimed at understanding and addressing those problems. By discussing issues of science and technology, popular culture, disasters, urbanization, racial and gender relations, domination and violence, as well as social movements, and by engaging in issues from a diversity of disciplines including anthropology, biology, economics, geography, psychology, and history, this course will reach a broad understanding of environmental issues. One unit.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

This course will explore the processes, policies, and programs that have shaped and affected the relationship between cities and the environment in the United States. Students will be exposed to a number of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of urban areas and the environment.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Environmental Racism was coined by environmental justice activists to describe situations where communities of color face disproportionate environmental ills and lack environmental privilege. In this course we look at the history of environmental racism, its relationship with capitalism, and several areas where environmental racism is most obvious, including, but not limited to: food, disasters, and the environmental movement itself.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

A descriptive and critical study of the 19th- and early 20th-century social thought which informs contemporary sociological theory. Some attention is given to historical influences on emerging sociological theory. Emphasis is placed on four major theorists: Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Simmel and on the 20th-century developments in functionalism, symbolic interactionism and the sociology of knowledge.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101. This course is for SOCL majors only.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

This course investigates the evolving role of television in shaping our understanding of the world as it relates to democracy, consumerism, human relationships, and how we make sense of our own lives. More specifically, the course examines the nature of entertainment, advertising, news, and the institutions that create television programming.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to feminist theories produced by womxn of color (broadly understood). In this course, we will decenter white Eurocentric feminisms and pay particular attention to the complex narratives, issues, oppressions, resilience, and movements for liberation undertaken by Black and African womxn, Chicana and Latina womxn, Indigenous womxn, East Asian and South Asian womxn, and Arab and Muslim womxn. We will be critically interrogating the diverse and interconnected struggles and identities of these populations across the social categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, religion, culture, and national origin. We will explore womxn of color feminisms through empirical studies, fiction and non-fiction texts, imagery, poetry, music, and film, gaining an appreciation for the multiple ways in which womxn have produced feminist thought.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

This course examines how individual bodies, hearts and minds are social phenomena. Topics include language, self, and what it means to be human; the sociology of emotion; the presentation of self in everyday life; micro-social order, disruption, and ontological security; and the micro-politics of interaction. Draws strongly from the symbolic interactionist, dramaturgical, and interpretive traditions.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

A thorough introduction to the sociological study of people's experience of late life. Strives to increase awareness of the social, cultural, and historical affects on aging by examining people's accounts of late life and aging, their social and psychological compensations, and the bearing of late life experiences on end-of-life decisions.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

GPA units: 0

An analysis of religion as a socio-cultural product. Emphasis on the interrelationship between religion and society in a cross-cultural perspective. Major topics include the social functions of religion, the organization of religious practice, and the impact of social change on religion.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

A critical study of the institution of modern medicine. Special attention is paid to socio-cultural and political factors influencing susceptibility, diagnosis and treatment. Topics include the social meaning of disease, patienthood, the medical profession, and the organization of medical care.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

A critical examination of education in the U.S., with a special emphasis on public schooling. This course considers how the functions and goals of education have changed over time, factors leading to the current crisis in education, and controversial programs for fixing the problems such as vouchers, charter schools, and multicultural education.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

GPA units: 0

Examination of patterns in American family behavior. Strives to increase awareness of the social, cultural, and psychological facets of family life by examining kinship relations, child socialization, dating behavior, patterns of sexual activity, parental decisions, family development, divorce, violence in the family.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

This course will reflect on key issues, debates, and activism in transnational feminisms. We will begin by challenging the imperial sociology of sex, gender, and sexuality by asking: is gender a western category? Are gender and sexuality useful categories beyond the West? Transnational, decolonial, and indigenous feminists have challenged neocolonial feminisms use of western gender categories and feminist rhetoric to construct and uphold cultural, political, and economic hierarchies between the Global North and South. We will track the intersectional feminist critiques and transnational perspectives on gender through several registers, historical eras, and geographical settings, including historical and contemporary perceptions of the veil; indigenous feminisms against dispossession, environmental injustice, and violence against women in settler colonialism; reproductive justice and the histories of non-consensual sterilization, market-based surrogacy, and transnational reproductive labor and carework. We will also examine specific sites of transnational feminist activism, for example by indigenous feminist on environmental issues and the Korean radical separatist feminist 4B movement. Finally, we will consider the epistemological reframing of US feminisms within the rubric of transnational as a necessary step to decolonize feminist theorizing and historiography. Along with theoretical and analytical texts, case studies, and thematic essays, the course will draw extensively on film as a medium to track the visual register though which to engage transnational feminisms.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Annually

On women's and men's gendered experiences at the individual, interactional, and institutional levels; how gendered experiences vary by race/ethnicity, sexuality, social class, and other ways.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course will examine the way social identities and everyday cultural practices are linked to global circulations of capital, taste, fashion, and power. Through a comparative analysis of representations of globalization, cultural products such as McDonald's and Sesame Street, mega-events such as the Olympics, virtual cultures and technologies, and leisure and consumption practices such as shopping, eating, and international tourism, students will gain a critical understanding of the debates surrounding cultural imperialism, cultural homogenization, and the hybridization of culture.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

This course focuses on the relationship between tourism and social life by considering how tourist practices are socially shaped and made meaningful within social contexts. This course explores tourism as a lens through which we can understand many of the features of contemporary social life, including modernity, late capitalism, and postcolonial legacies, consumption and cultural commodification, gender and sexual politics, and life in a risk society, especially in the wake of a global pandemic.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101 or MONT 102C from Fall 2021 or MONT 103C from Spring 2022.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

In this course, students shall critically engage key concepts and themes in thestudy of visual culture, with special emphasis given to questions of race, gender, and representation. Following an initial exploration of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and Marxist approaches to the study of visual culture, students shall investigate the role of representation in the social organization and development of racism, sexism, and other forms of social inequality. The course concludes by reviewing key strategies of visual critique and contestation, and by foregrounding ongoing social challenges arising from the seductions of scopophilia and abjection. Combining lectures, case analyses, and interactive dialogue, this course requires careful reading, active participation, and ongoing reflection.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

This is a student-led course in the sociology of death and dying. During the first few weeks of the term, readings will offer a broad overview of what it is like to die and care for people who are dying in the contemporary United States. After a brief introduction to how sociologists approach and understand this landscape, students will participate in the selection of topics and readings. For the remainder of the term, students will learn and educate one another about the lines of inquiry in this subfield that interest them the most. All iterations of the course will include an introduction to death-positivity, the social movement that gave rise to hospice care in the United States and England in the 1960s. Other common topics include movements such as Black Lives Matter and AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power; the transnational deaths of migrant families; the relationship between contemporary Western medicine and mortality; and peoples experiences with paranormal phenomena such as ghosts.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

With a focus on understanding social structures and inequality, sociology offers an important perspective on artificial intelligence (AI), how it is used by individuals in their everyday lives, and what its rapid advancement and adoption means for society writ large. In this course, we will examine AI through a sociological lens to understand how individuals impact AI and how AI impacts individuals, focusing on potentially positive and negative AI use cases. Among the specific cases and topics we will discuss are AIs role in assisting people with disabilities; AIs relationship with academic achievement; AIs impact on worker productivity; and, ethical issues AI raises concerning privacy, bias, discrimination, possible job loss, and loss of authenticity (e.g., deepfakes and more). This is not a computer science course, but understanding the basic components of AI is one of its student learning objectives. And although the course will include AI-based assignments, no technical experience is required. Pre-Req: SOCL 101. In addition, students who have previously taken AI, Social Life, and Society will not be allowed to enroll in this course during the Spring 2026 semester.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101, and it cannot be taken by students who have taken SOCL 399: "Artificial Intelligence, Social Life, and Society".

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

This senior-level course centers the actions, worldviews, and experiences of colonized peoples as they negotiated freedoms and unfreedoms during the pre-colonial and colonial eras and wrestle with these legacies for today and into the future as we consider abolition, decolonization, and appropriate reparations for this history. Throughout the semester, we will address the histories of colonialism, capitalism, enslaving, and their relationship to contemporary racisms and decolonial movements in the US and abroad. A course project will enable to students to develop concrete understandings of decolonial praxes rooted in indigenous worldviews, knowledges, and actions and the ways in which colonized peoples seek, demand, and maintain their freedom in the face of multiply manifest unfreedoms. This course will change topically each semester depending on current events and student interests, to focus on national and international coloniality and decoloniality.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101; SOCL 223 recommended.

GPA units: 1

Embracing the maxim advanced by the journal Race Traitor (1992'2005) that 'Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity,' this course offers students an opportunity to pursue a critical study of whiteness from an anti-racist perspective. By engaging and assessing key contributions to the field of critical whiteness studies, students will familiarize themselves with the historical origins, epistemological characteristics, and practical effects­­­­­­ of whiteness as a sociological phenomenon. By considering themes including racial formation, culture, privilege, and the role of allies in anti-racist struggle, students will work to denaturalize whiteness and reflect upon what its abolition might mean both for white people and for communities impacted by white supremacy. Combining lectures, case analyses, and interactive dialogue, this course requires careful reading, active participation, and ongoing reflection.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

Precarious work" refers to forms of employment that are insecure (Kalleberg 2007, 2009). In this seminar course, we will attempt to answer a number of questions that should be not only intellectually interesting, but also personally relevant as you enter the labor market yourself: How do economic conditions, labor market regulations, and employers' decisions shape the availability of jobs? How do sociological factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and cultural factors shape who gets a job and what type of job one gets? What are the psychological and health consequences of having a good versus a bad job? What does the future of work hold, given technological and other changes?

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing social, economic, and political landscapes around the world. AI is the subject of numerous contemporary debates including about the ethics and legality of its use, the effects of AI on social life, and AIs relative societal benefits and costs (e.g., Ford 2021). Guided by the sociological imagination and contemporary sociological theories, this seminar engages these debates and covers numerous use cases of AI in social life as well as across social institutions and structures, such as the legal and criminal justice systems, the educational system, the economy and work, and health care. Given the widespread and increasing use of AI, such knowledge is practically important for students future educational and career prospects (e.g., McKinsey & Company 2023). Although this is not a computer science course that will teach students all of the ins and outs about how to use AI, it will teach students some basics and integrate AI-based assessments.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course examines first-person accounts of living with various illnesses, including the subjective experiences of illnesses that are mental/physical, acute/chronic, curable/fatal and age-related. Comparisons will be made across both historical and cultural contexts to highlight the socially constructed nature of health and aging. The class will engage the role of labeling theory, postmodern conceptions of health, and differences according to race, class, gender, sexual orientation and age.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Annually

This course examines how people experience and cope with negative events such as illness, death, separation or divorce, unemployment, natural disaster and war. Delving into topics that are usually the purview of psychology, our investigations highlight the social nature of self, cognition, emotion and identity. Readings will focus on particular cases of trouble, the roles of religion, psychology and medicine in helping people to cope with tragedy, and cultural and historical variability in how humans make sense of suffering.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

This is a student-led seminar in the sociology of death and dying. During,the first few weeks of the term, readings will offer a broad overview of what it is like to die and care for people who are dying in the contemporary United States. After a brief introduction to how sociologists approach and understand this landscape, students will participate in theselection of topics and readings. For the remainder of the term, students will learn and educate one another about the lines of inquiry in this subfield that interest them the most.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

This seminar examines some of the most pressing social issues of our present by deconstructing fictional accounts of our imagined futures. Through a selection of science fiction (literature, television, and film), students analyze how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age are resolved, exacerbated, or ignored in each narrative.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This advanced seminar aimed at returning study abroad students explores the related concepts of home, belonging and citizenship in light of globalization and mobility. In addition to reflecting on personal experiences of home and mobility, we study narrative accounts by refugees, migrants, tourists and expatriates to think in new ways about global citizenship.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101 and study abroad experience

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

This course will examine representations of Muslims as they appear in historical and contemporary American media and popular culture. In tracing the portrayals of Muslims in American news, film, television, social media, music, comedy, and other media forms chronologically, we will examine how the construction of the Muslim has changed over time due to major historical and sociopolitical events  both domestic and global. Grounding our investigation in theory, we will begin with classical orientalist depictions, followed by Cold War and Gulf War era depictions, and conclude this investigation with contemporary depictions of Muslims in Americas War on Terror. While the first half of the semester will cover the wests portrayal of Muslims, noting the ways by which these representations uphold racial, gender and class hierarchies, the latter half will examine how Muslims have shaped their own representations to disrupt and counter their dehumanization in the media. We will examine media projects created by Muslims, such as Ms. Marvel, Ramy, Mo, The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, and others, to evaluate how Muslims choose to represent themselves and their stories in contemporary popular culture. This is a reading and media heavy course, as we will be covering theory through books and journal articles, and evaluating media projects by watching films and television shows in and out of the classroom. The material for this class is explored through an interdisciplinary approach focusing on scholarship mainly from sociology, anthropology, history, media studies, religious studies, ethnic studies and womens and gender studies.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Guided by the premise that dying should be a meaningful, personally transformative, and even gratifying process, the death positive movement gave rise to hospice care in the 1960s and manifests today in the form of death cafes, end-of-life doulas, and home burials. Most of the movements leaders, then and now, have been college educated white women living in North America and the United Kingdom. In this seminar, we will place their activism in political and historical context, examining how race, class, gender, and religion inform death positive ideas about good dying and end-of-life care.

Prerequisite: SOCL 101

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

The Honors Colloquium will cover topics such as: strategies for thesis work, writing an intro to the thesis, IRB application and approval process, ways to write a review of the literature chapter, ethics in research, writing workshops for the students, practice sessions for the formal oral presentations for the April conferences, publication possibilities, etc. The colloquium will also feature guest speakers who will discuss aspects of graduate studies, professional issues, job market issues, and their own research. Department honors students will continue to be mentored by their individual honors thesis advisor.

GPA units: 0.5

Typically Offered: Fall

The Honors Colloquium is required for students enrolled in the department Honors Program. The colloquium meets biweekly to cover various research topics related to research design, implementation, and dissemination and to help students prepare for their culminating presentations at the Academic Conference. The colloquium is offered on a pass/no pass basis.

GPA units: 0.5

Typically Offered: Spring

Honors students undertake a research project under the direction of a department faculty member. The results are presented in the form of a thesis and two semesters credit, granted at end of second semester. Candidates selected from invited applicants to the Department Honors Committee.

GPA units: 0

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Honors students undertake a research project under the direction of a department faculty member. The results are presented in the form of a thesis and two semesters credit, granted at end of second semester. Candidates selected from invited applicants to the Department Honors Committee.

GPA units: 2

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Students may undertake independent research projects under the direct supervision of a faculty member. Individuals contemplating a research project should make inquiries during their third year, since the project is usually initiated by the beginning of the fourth year. Preference for sociology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Students may undertake independent research projects under the direct supervision of a faculty member. Individuals contemplating a research project should make inquiries during their third year, since the project is usually initiated by the beginning of the fourth year. Preference for sociology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

An individualized reading program addressing a topic in sociology not covered in course offerings. Reading tutorials are under the supervision of a sociology faculty member, usually limited to the fourth year students, and arranged on an individual basis. Preference to sociology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

An individualized reading program addressing a topic in sociology not covered in course offerings. Reading tutorials are under the supervision of a sociology faculty member, usually limited to the fourth year students, and arranged on an individual basis. Preference to sociology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Program for individual students who wish to pursue supervised independent study on a selected topic or an advanced research project. Ordinarily projects are approved for one semester. Open to selected third- and fourth-year students with preference to sociology majors. Each project must be supervised by a faculty member.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

A one-semester introduction to the main modes of cultural anthropological analysis of non-Western cultures, such as those of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, sub-Saharan Africa and Native America. Topics include: ethnographic methods; concepts of culture; symbolic communication; ecological processes; introduction to anthropological approaches to kinship, religion, gender, hierarchy, economics, medicine, political life, transnational processes.

Enrollment limited to 1st and 2nd year students only

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Taking the idea of worlding, or ways of collective living through the senses in relation to women's storytelling as a foundation, this course invites students to participate in a poetics of visceral encounter with Arab women's worlds. Through the lens of feminist ethnography, which questions the line between the fictional and the 'real', we will explore the intimate social, political and cultural geographies of Arab women in the MENA region and its diasporas. We will attend to the everyday and embodied realities of Arab women through themes of identity, power, violence, war, exile, memory, revolution, home, love, and belonging, from traditional ethnographic texts to literature, poetry and experimental art, film and life writing. In doing so, we summon the social worlds and gendered imaginaries that grow out of women's lives as ethnographic text.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Spring

The UN reports that 2/3 of the global workforce operates in the "informal economy." This course develops an anthropological approach to that fact. Our foundation is the literature on the informal economy in Africa and other parts of the global south, but we will also explore economic processes closer to home. Topics include: the origin, development, and use of the "informal economy" concept, precarious livelihoods, micro-credit and "bottom of the pyramid" ventures, informal networks, illicit trade, smuggling, black markets, and organized crime.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

This course explores cross-cultural variation within and among legal institutions. Through the medium of ethnography, as well as original primary-source research into court proceedings and legal disputes, we consider how law becomes a mechanism for the maintenance of social order at the same time that it can contribute to social inequity. We will address central questions in the anthropology of law: How does our cultural background influence how we conceptualize justice? What are the consequences of finding oneself between competing legal systems? Why are questions of legality so often tied up with our conceptions of human nature? Our focus will be to examine critically the social and cultural dynamics behind dispute resolution, corporate law, crime, torts, religious law, and international courts, as well as dilemmas around policing and other ways people encounter the law in everyday life. Case studies from diverse legal environments in both industrialized and small-scale societies will help place Western law traditions in a comparative, global perspective.

GPA units: 1

Is there any validity to the claim that women in the Global South have largely been "left out", "marginalized" and even "harmed" by development programs and ideologies? And is development a new form of imperialism? The course begins with discussion of anthropological and feminist critiques of "development" and then examines successes and shortfalls of different strategies used to "bring women back" into development. We then evaluate the gendered impacts of development policies, programs promoted by international development agencies.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

This course examines the concept of Reproductive Justice, understood as the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of womens human rights. More than focusing solely on the pro-choice issue, the Reproductive Justice framework addresses the social reality of the inequality of opportunities available to women to control their reproductive destinies. In that sense, this framework attempts to analyze how the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions of her community. The course draws on various theoretical and analytic tools to explore the social, legal, and economic barriers for accessing reproductive health care domestically and internationally, specifically in Latin America. Three areas of focus are included in this framework: (1) the right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Over the past few years the very limit of what is "male" and what is "female" seems to have become more unstable and fluid in our society and around the world. Similarly, recent scholarship on "gender" has disputed conventional academic wisdom of how gender and sexuality are produced, embodied and performed by individuals. Anthropology and feminist theory have furthered these debates by offering a significant reappraisal of "gender" - as a concept, social relationship and category of analysis. In this course, we will develop a critical stance toward the study of gender and sexuality by taking anthropology's and feminism's insights into account as we explore the power dynamics that play into the social construction of the body. We will pay attention to how various peoples (including ourselves), living at different times, have fashioned social distinctions based on gender and sexuality, and how these distinctions have played a role in the organization of political, religious, economic and ideological practices. Among the topics we will cover are: the nature/nurture debate, kinship, psychoanalysis, transgender identity, race, gender under colonialism, and performativity.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

In this course, we will explore anthropological work on debt, then use it to think through contemporary issues, both here in the US and elsewhere in the world. We will start by discussing the focal role of debt in a variety of religious traditions and revisiting the classical anthropology of exchange. Then we'll explore connections between debt, money, and finance, as they have appeared in different times and places. Along the way, we will consider everything from feuds and blood money, to debt peonage and slavery, to the origins of central banking and state finance, to structural adjustment programs and anti-debt activism. As we wrap up, we'll look at a number of recent trends in our own milieu, including the bail/bond system, subprime loans, and student debt, as well as matters from further afield, like microcredit schemes and the role of debt in migration.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Annually

The course provides an overview of the ways that anthropologists have approached issues of sickness, disease, and healing, particularly in the study of the cultural construction of health and illness, the therapeutic process, social stratification, and health inequalities. Through case studies and synthesizing readings, the course will review key theoretical, conceptual, methodological and practical approaches to the study of health and illness, using a cross-cultural, global, and comparative perspective. As such, the course is designed to promote an appreciation for the variety of human suffering and responses to illness and healing, as well as to developing a crucial understanding of our own system of medicine as a cultural product. Key course objectives include: 1) to examine the historical trends of Medical Anthropology theory and practice; 2) to compare and contrast current issues and methodological approaches in the field; and 3) to examine ways that anthropological concepts and methods are used in research on national and international health issues

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

A social scientific, cross-cultural consideration of religious worlds created in such locales as village and urban Indonesia, India, Papua New Guinea, and Africa, especially in terms of their power dynamics vis-a-vis social hierarchies. Covers classic topics such as the study of ritual and ecology, village myth, trancing, shamanism, witchcraft, and sorcery accusations, but also deals at length with such matters as the connections between Christian missions and empire. Also turns an anthropological gaze on contemporary U.S. religions.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

This course will critically examine the social construction of race and racism in different cultural contexts. The course will question the biological basis of racial difference, and take anthropology to task for participating in a long history of scientific racism. After this quick historical background, we will tackle contemporary forms of racism across the world, and read about the struggles against racism and white supremacy, from the fight against settler colonialism and segregation, to Black Lives Matter and immigration rights. Racist ideologies are deeply entrenched in institutions and have ongoing effects on the health, wellbeing and livelihood of millions of people, so it is crucial we become aware of the way racism operates to begin the work of undoing it.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Annually

The main focus of this course will be the perennial question of inequality in Latin America  a region of the world beleaguered by a long history of immense differences between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the ruling elites and the people. We will pay close attention to the ways in which gender, race and sexuality inform those economic and political inequalities, and how they are being challenged by the region's important transformations over the last couple of decades. Throughout the course, we will keep in mind that Latin America cannot be examined in isolation, but in relation to foreign powers (including the United States) that have had vested interests in the region. We will tackle controversial topics such as the School of the Americas, the Rigoberta Menchú testimonial and affirmative action policies in Brazil. By the end of the course, students will be expected to have a good grasp of the amazing cultural diversity in Latin America, and its unique quandaries, social movements and hopes for the future.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course takes a broadly comparative and historical perspective, using cross-cultural analysis to understand the workings of politics and power, in Western and non-Western contexts. Topics include: colonialism and its impact on colonized populations; the formation of post-colonial national states; leadership, authority, and the construction of political subjects; and the links between local processes and global political systems.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

An introduction to the issues, methods, and concepts of economic anthropology. This course places economic features such as markets, commodities, and money into a larger cross-cultural context by exploring relations of power, kinship, gender, exchange, and social transformation.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

GPA units: 0

A comparative, cultural anthropological exploration of fashion and consumption as tools for the creation, expression, and contestation of social, cultural, economic, political and individual identities. Topics include: anthropological and semiotic theories of materialism and consumption, subcultural styles, colonialism, race, gender, religious dress, globalization and ethnic chic.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Every Third Year

This course provides an introductory anthropological account of 20th- and 21st-century Africa. The central theme is the "representation" of Africa and Africans, including the manner in which outsiders have portrayed the continent and its peoples in the past, African responses and rejoinders, and current scholarship and forms of self-representation. We will cover a number of broader themes, including music, race, art, ethnicity, youth, economic activity, "tradition" and "modernity," and the politics of cultural translation.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Social Science

Typically Offered: Annually

Nearly a century ago, anthropologist Margaret Meads "Coming of Age in Samoa" introduced a broad public to the issues facing youth in modern society and proposed various approaches to understanding these problems. Paying homage to Meads seminal work, this course examines the subjectivities and daily life experiences of youth navigating the conceptual, territorial and affective borders created by nationalism, war, displacement, occupation, colonialism and other social and political contexts in a variety of global situations. At a time when we are bearing (painful) witness to the suffering of those forced to navigate the unwieldy terrains of a reinstating and strengthening of borders and border walls, we will examine how youth in Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, the U.S./Mexico border, and our nation's own internal "others" 'come of age' by negotiating the construction of identities, movement across (often militarized) spaces, and political violence as they push up against carceral and colonial state formations. At the same time, we will attend to the politics of such witnessing, and the potentials (and impossibilities) of ethnographic engagement with youth struggling to define themselves, their communities and their futures at the border.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Social Science

This course aims to develop students ability to think ethnographically and comparatively about contemporary Africa, using the theme of "infrastructure" as a starting point. For our purposes, the term infrastructure points to both material connectionslike utilities, transport, and financial systemsand the diverse social connections that constitute everyday life. We will engage the literature about infrastructure, especially in African towns and cities and consider the way that specific local experiences fit into wider political, economic, and social trends on the continent. We will also discuss matters of culture, race, gender, generation, migration, and representation, and the ways that each is implicated in African social geographies and socio-technical networks. The joint result is a course that provides an introduction to both contemporary Africa and the literature on infrastructure and urban life in the global South.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Annually

Do we all have the same emotions, or do they vary across cultures? Where do our feelings come from? Who in a society has the right to feel, and to feel what? Where are they allowed and where are they not allowed, and how should they be managed? What are the effects of emotions, on us and on others? How do we recognize emotions, how do we learn about them, and how do we manage them? These questions have interested anthropologists for a long time, but in a more focused way since the 1980s, as they began to explore how varied emotions are, how differently they are experienced, how they are recognized, which are legitimated and where and how, who is entitled to them and who isnt, how they are taught, and the frictions and management problems they pose in different parts of the world. We will follow such anthropological explorations in societies ranging from Africa, to Asia, South America, and the Pacific, and also examine the politics and culture of emotions in the US and Europe. We start with some ground-setting  what is an anthropological approach? How do we bring that to emotions we tend to think of as innate or universal? We touch base with some ideas about emotion that come to us from Western thought  its relationship to nature and civilization, its differential association with categories of people. Well continue to think with Big Questions  not just these, but others as they come up  that reach beyond the specific cases we study. For the main part of the course, we will focus on a small set of emotions. Indeed, well focus a lot on love! But we will turn to sorrow, anger, guilt, and happiness, as well.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Annually

Anthropologists have long recognized how shared memories shape community, how social life shapes memories, and how memories are sites of contest, legitimation and disenfranchisement, and commodification. We look at critically at classic statements on social life and memory (and forgetting) to examine questions of names, monuments, and officializing histories, along with counter-histories and decentering of official memory, and the making of "heritage," as they are produced and shaped in discursive and material form, bodily and emotive forms, and in actions and practices around the world.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

An examination of cultural anthropology's main data-gathering strategy: long-term ethnographic fieldwork of small communities, often located in non-Western cultures. Topics include: review of the methodology literature, participant observation, in-depth interviews, designing field studies, oral histories, spanning deep cultural divides via fieldwork. Often involves hands-on fieldwork in Worcester.

Prerequisite: One previous ANTH course

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Spring

A historical examination of the development of different theoretical perspectives in cultural anthropology. This course explores, compares, and critiques different schools of thought about human society and culture, from the 19th to the 21st centuries, looking at the ways in which anthropological scholars and those from related disciplines have attempted to understand and explain the human condition.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall

Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, voluntary and forced migration from across the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa to the Western Hemisphere has taken place for a number of economic, political, cultural, and other motivations. Individuals and their descendants from the region went on to create powerful diasporic communities in Latin America, making significant contributions to various social, political and cultural landscapes. While some readily assimilated into their new homes, others retained an indelible sense of dislocation from and belonging to their homeland.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course will critically examine the wide variety of approaches, tactics, discourses and objectives adopted by activists from around the globe in the effort to further LGBTQ+ rights, and discuss the ways that this activism centered on sexuality and/or gender identity intersects with race, class, religion, nationality and cultural identity. Although many nations around the world have experienced important advances over the last few decades in the effort to include LGBTQ+ populations, we cannot assume that progress on these issues is uniform or that it will look the same in different contexts. The course will push students to consider the ways that Western LGBTQ+ identities cannot be imposed on other contexts uncritically, and to consider how global activism can complicate efforts in different localities, render certain identities vulnerable, or participate in neocolonialist forms of pinkwashing. Queer activism that is truly global and sensitive to cultural difference requires queering activist practices themselves, and creating equal partnerships rather than top-down approaches to spreading LGBTQ+ rights.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course explores the relationship between love and colonialism, and between Indigeneity and decolonial love. We will consider ways that love--familial, romantic, nationalist--serves to perpetuate colonial structures. Conversely, we will consider how alternative imaginaries and forms of love can serve, in anti-colonial struggles, to resist the intimacies of colonial violence or forms of oppression that are not necessarily tied to colonialism, expanding beyond the realm of human kinships to include land and the more-than-human. Students will gain a familiarity with anthropological concepts and methodological approaches to love, while exploring decolonial and Indigenous theories and praxes that help us reenvision our relationships to each other and love as a radical force for social change.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

The Honors Colloquium will cover topics such as: strategies for thesis work, writing an intro to the thesis, IRB application and approval process, ways to write a review of the literature chapter, ethics in research, writing workshops for the students, practice sessions for the formal oral presentations for the April conferences, publication possibilities, etc. The colloquium will also feature guest speakers who will discuss aspects of graduate studies, professional issues, job market issues, and their own research. Department honors students will continue to be mentored by their individual honors thesis advisor.

GPA units: 0.5

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

The Honors Colloquium will cover topics such as: strategies for thesis work, writing an intro to the thesis, IRB application and approval process, ways to write a review of the literature chapter, ethics in research, writing workshops for the students, practice sessions for the formal oral presentations for the April conferences, publication possibilities, etc. The colloquium will also feature guest speakers who will discuss aspects of graduate studies, professional issues, job market issues, and their own research. Department honors students will continue to be mentored by their individual honors thesis advisor.

GPA units: 0.5

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Honors students undertake a research project under the direction of a department faculty member. The results are presented in the form of a thesis and two semesters credit, granted at end of second semester. Candidates selected from invited applicants to the Department Honors Committee.

GPA units: 0

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Honors students undertake a research project under the direction of a department faculty member. The results are presented in the form of a thesis and two semesters credit, granted at end of second semester. Candidates selected from invited applicants to the Department Honors Committee.

GPA units: 2

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Students may undertake independent research projects under the direct supervision of a faculty member. Individuals contemplating a research project should make inquiries during their third year, since the project is usually initiated by the beginning of the fourth year. Preference for sociology/anthropology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Students may undertake independent research projects under the direct supervision of a faculty member. Individuals contemplating a research project should make inquiries during their third year, since the project is usually initiated by the beginning of the fourth year. Preference for sociology/anthropology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

An individualized reading program usually addressing a topic in anthropology not covered in course offerings. Reading tutorials are under the supervision of an anthropology faculty member, usually limited to the fourth year students, and arranged on an individual basis. Preference to anthropology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

An individualized reading program usually addressing a topic in anthropology not covered in course offerings. Reading tutorials are under the supervision of an anthropology faculty member, usually limited to the fourth year students, and arranged on an individual basis. Preference to anthropology majors.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring

Program for individual students who wish to pursue supervised independent study on a selected topic or an advanced research project. Ordinarily projects are approved for one semester. Open to selected third- and fourth-year students with preference to sociology/anthropology majors. Each project must be supervised by a faculty member.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Fall, Spring