Upper-Division

This intensive survey course examines the intellectual origins of the sociological tradition, focusing on changing conceptions of social order, social change, and the trends observed in the development of Western civilization in the modern era. Readings are all taken from original texts and include many of the classical works in social theory with special emphasis on the ideas of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, which constitute the core of the discipline. Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements.

Surveys major theoretical perspectives currently available in the discipline including functionalism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conflict theory, critical theory, neo-Marxism, and feminist theory.

Covers designing doable ICT-based projects to support the goals of community and NGOs. Topics include: social entrepreneurship/enterprise case studies; step-by-step project design; integrating social and technical solutions; project management. Technical topics include: Internet resources; advanced web/database design; computer networks/maintenance. Prerequisite(s): SOCY 30A and by permission of instructor. (Formerly SOCY 30B.)

Covers conversion of ICT project into a fundable grant proposal for social justice, integration of social activism, entrepreneurship and justice, and implementation of project. Topics include: funders, proposal design, field methods, project assessment, innovative ICT applications, action research methods. (Formerly course 30C.)

Provides Everett Program Fellows with hands-on experience, working in teams, running a digital social enterprise and managing technology-linked projects implemented with student teams. Fellows work closely with faculty and staff of the Everett Program for Technology and Social change, managing and implementing all aspects of the program, including fundraising and financial administration, project planning and development, maintaining communication with community partners, and mentoring younger students in the project in their own technology learning and project implementation activities. Prerequisite(s): SOCY 30A, SOCY 107A, and SOCY 107B. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor.

Focuses on the interaction between family and society by considering the historical and social influences on family life and by examining how the family unit affects the social world. Readings draw on theory, history, and ethnographic materials.

Explores the historical origins of contemporary civic polarization through the decades of political, cultural, technological. and legal changes that have resulted in our current combative political environment.

Explores the interconnections between sports and society using sociological theories and methods. Topics include class, race, and gender; mass media and popular culture; political economy; education and socialization; leisure patterns (participants and spectators); globalization and cross-national comparisons.

Explores the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies. Surveys the work of social scientists, media scholars, philosophers and others to better understand the role of sound in society. Lectures are presented in an audio-only format with a variety of listening activities and supplemental videos. By the end of the course, students will have a working understanding of the field of Sound Studies and a completed final project of their own design.

Examines media institutions, communication technologies, and their related cultural expressions. Focuses on specific ways the media—including media studies and criticism—operates as social and cultural factor. Contemporary theory or equivalent in related fields recommended.

Introduction to questions of immigration, nationalism, and racism in contemporary Europe. Addresses colonial roots of migration to Europe; patterns of immigration and responses to immigrants across different European regions; and political movements led by immigrants and other people of color.

The intensification of immigration enforcement in the United States and the associated rise of mass deportations have reached the lives of millions of immigrants and local communities. Course covers the context, determinants, and consequences of enforcement and deportation practices.

Considers the role of popular music as a site of contemporary social practices and cultural politics. Examines the institutional organization and production of popular music, its cultural meanings, and its social uses by different communities and social formations. Also examines popular music as a vehicle through which major cultural and political debates about identity, sexuality, community, and politics are staged and performed.

If people define things as real, they are real in their consequences, quipped W.I. Thomas. Surveys sociological theories about where and how knowledge comes from, and the politics of knowledge, with reference to contemporary debates surrounding issues, such as climate change, genetics, and inequality.

Focuses on the role feminist discourses play in cultural politics emphasizing sex, sexuality, and sex work as related to gender, race , and class. Examines the relationship between academic and popular feminisms. Interrogates post-feminism, third-wave feminism, and generational differences in feminisms. Formerly Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Politics.)

Analysis of the current health care crises and exploration of the social relationships and formal organizations which constitute the medical institution. Study of the political, economic, and cultural factors which affect the recognition, distribution, and response to illness.

Teaches critical skills for analyzing the co-production of genomics and society. Examines issues at stake as societies across the world increasingly turn to genomic data to cure disease, solve crimes, regulate immigration, revitalize economies, and answer age-old questions about who we are.

Explores the social forces that shape legal outcomes and the ways law, in turn, influences social life. Traces the history and political economy of American law; the relation between law and social change; how this relation is shaped by capitalism and democracy; and how class, race, and gender are expressed in welfare and regulatory law.

Examines transnational dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, with special attention to knowledge production, scientific practices, and therapeutics outside of North America and Western Europe. Students develop a conceptual foundation to analyze the global scale and impacts of scientific research.

Learn to critically consume documentary, ethnographic film, photojournalism, and the genre of realism as these methods are increasingly used to describe the social world. Addresses theoretical, methodological, practical, and ethical issues of creating visual media. Optional media lab teaches students how to create visual products as well.

A healthy society requires a stable and sustainable relationship between society and nature. Covering past, present, and future, the course covers environmental history of the U.S., the variety and extent of environmental problems today, and explores their likely development in our lifetimes.

Explores social and cultural aspects of human sexuality and reproduction, including how and why meanings and behaviors are contested. Analyzes sexuality and reproduction as forms of social and political control as well as cultural expression and self-determination.

Explores the history of the use and abuse of consciousness-altering substances like alcohol and other drugs. Social-psychological theories of addiction are reviewed in tandem with political-economic analyses to identify the social conditions under which the cultural practices involved in drug use come to be defined as public problems. An introductory sociology course is recommended prior to taking this course.

Engages the social, historical, and economic trajectories of the drugs, illicit and licit, botanical and pharmaceutical within U.S. society. Through an examination of case studies, and other texts of encounter, explores how international, state, and local actors mediate as interlocutors between globalized interests, local knowledges, and the molecules we have increasingly come to know, ingest, and incorporate.

Introduction to contemporary analysis of Japan's race relations, ethnic conflicts, and a government's failure to restore remedial justice for war victims in Japan, Asia, and the U.S. Specific issues include comfort women, national or state narratives on Hiroshima, forced labor during World War II, and Haydon legislation that allows war victims to sue the Japanese government and corporations in California.

Introduces survey research methods including problem formulation, research design, instrument construction, data collection, codification, data processing, computer analyses, and report writing. The greater emphasis is placed on statistical analyses and questionnaire constructions.

Provided an overview of socio-political theories and thoughts from Athenian Direct Democracy in 500 BC, to Classical Liberalism, Social Contract, Libertarian Socialism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Neo-Liberalism, Anarcho-Primitism, and lastly Indigenism in relation to the revival of indigenous knowledge, theMother Earth law, and the restoration of the nature's rights as espoused by many governments in the Third World today.

An introduction to comparative and historical analyses of the relation between race and law in the U.S. Emphasis on examinations of continuous colonial policies and structural mechanisms that help maintain and perpetuate racial inequality in law, criminal justice, and jury trials. (Formerly Race and Justice)

Adoption of the jury and its varied forms in different nations provides ideal opportunities to examine differences between systems of popular legal participation. Course considers reasons why the right to jury trial is currently established in Japan or Asian societies, but abandoned or severely curtailed in others. American jury contrasted with other forms of lay participation in the legal process.

Examines war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the evolution and role of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Examines the evolution of the concept of international law, the rationale for its birth and existence, roots of international conflicts and genocides, possible remedies available to victims, mechanisms for the creation and enforcement of international legal order, as well as the role of colonialism, migration, poverty, race/ethnic conflicts, gender, and international corporations in creating and maintaining conflicts and wars.

Examines the hidden politics of popular pleasure, studying the workings of domination and transgression in popular culture and everyday life. Explores not only media representations but cultural practices as well. Examines both cultural production and consumption. Considers how hegemonic discourses render the politics of resistance invisible.

Following food from mouth to dirt, explores the politics, economy, and culture of eating, feeding, buying, selling, and growing food. Topics cover both the political economy of the food system as well as how body and nature are contested categories at either end of this system.

Explores relationship between modern forms of cultural production and the economy and society in which they emerge. Course reads, screens, and discusses variety of the cultural texts: from the historical and theoretical to the commercial, popular, and counter-cultural.

Reviews social and cultural perspectives on science and technology, including functionalist, Marxist, Kuhnian, social constructionist, ethnographic, interactionist, anthropological, historical, feminist, and cultural studies perspectives. Topics include sociology of knowledge, science as a social problem, lab studies, representations, practice, controversies, and biomedical knowledge and work.

Takes as its subject, the dialogues, debates, conceptions, and strategies of self representation produced by blacks in the U.S. and Atlantic world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These issues are examined through the insights of feminist theory, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, and African American studies.

The role of American network television in the production of the post-war American national imagination is our focus. Our approach will explore issues of media power, especially television's industrial apparatus, its network structure, its strategies of representation in relationship to the construction of the image of the nation, and the meaning of citizens, consumers, and audiences.

This experiential course explores the theoretical foundations, history, and future of healing justice as a framework using an embodied approach. Healing justice has shaped wide-ranging fields, from grassroots organizing and holistic health, to grant-making, and education. While the framework informs a dynamic movement, healing justice is grounded in consistent commitments like collective healing; centering Black, indigenous and people of color knowledges; and more that guide this course. Grounded in somatic or embodied inquiry, students engage various materials—from academic articles to poetry—using some of the restorative practices that are central to healing justice work.

Major theories and concepts in sociological study of social psychology. Topics include identity and social interaction, deviance, sociology of emotions, social narratives, and the social construction of reality.

Why certain social acts are considered threatening and how individuals or groups become stigmatized. Sociological analysis of the institutions and processes of social control and the experience of becoming deviant and living with a stigmatized identity. Introductory course in sociology recommended.

Research practicum which examines methods and problems of qualitative field research both through examining literature published in this tradition and by carrying out directed field exercises. Students also design and carry out their own research project.

Introduces critical digital methods to examine ethical and epistemological concerns with Big Data, archives and digital collections, organizational records, mobile ethnographies, social media, and crowd-sourced data. Students use open-source text mining and data-visualization programs.

Introduces Geographic Information Systems (GIS) including methods to analyze geographic data and create maps. Students learn software, such as Google Map APIs and Bing Maps APIs, and focus on the ArcGIS mapping software. A course in statistics is recommended as preparation.

Covers the theories and methods associated with community-based and participatory action research. Students review relevant scholarship then engage in a collective field research project in collaboration with a community organization. Themes, collaborations, and research projects vary. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor.

This course uses historical, sociological, and social psychological materials to introduce students to issues concerning class and power, religion and power, minorities and power, women and power, the rise of the New Right, and the successes and failures of the Left.

Familiarizes students with the major social welfare programs and policies in the U.S., exploring changes in conceptualizations of social welfare, and offering a critical perspective on the present-day welfare state.  

Concerns the routine and taken-for-granted activities that make up our interactions with one another, consisting in large part—but not exclusively—of verbal exchanges. Emphasis on the socially situated character of communication, whether intimacy between two people or dominance of a group.

How have plants been part of Black-led community health and healing in the Americas? How has this botanical knowledge been central to material and discursive geographies of blackness; to how blackness is lived; and to how blackness is constructed in health narratives, policy, and movements? In addition to learning about Black botanical knowledge in North and Latin America (African-American and Afro-Latinx), students analyze their own social locations; interrogate assumptions about local and traditional plant knowledge; and encounter broad understandings of health that include environmental, economic, and spiritual dimensions. Students engage with academic texts, news stories, art, and creative writing.

Examines conflicting views on the development and state of modern masculinity as adaptation, transitional phase, or pathology. Did men lose the gender war? Do boys need rescuing? What are common and divergent social experiences of men within race, class, gender, culture, era? An introductory sociology course recommended.

Why do people live longer today than they did 50 years ago? What drives differences in health between neighborhoods or nations? This course introduces students to questions and concepts central to the study of population health—an interdisciplinary field based in demography, sociology, and epidemiology. It examines the policy implications and limitations of research on population health. Students practice evaluating evidence, translating big-picture concepts into measurable variables, and working with data.

What about America is making Americans sick? In this interdisciplinary course, students consider the changing social context of health in the United States and the social and political commitments necessary to protect health as a human right. Students analyze current challenges at the intersection of structural racism, political values, and health, and examine the ways that framing health as personal versus public responsibility is consequential for social policy. Using case studies, students envision a human rights- based response to these and other health challenges. Enrollment is restricted to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

Examines educational inequality in the United States, focusing on contemporary debates and issues, especially in the California context. Covers schooling from preschool to higher education, and examines educational inequality from a system, setting, and individual-level perspective.

Modern analyses of sexuality and gender show personal life closely linked to large-scale social structures: power relations, economic processes, structures of emotion. Explores these links, examining questions of bodily difference, femininity and masculinity, structures of inequality, the state in sexual politics, and the global re-making of gender in modern history. Recommended as background: any lower-division sociology course.

Explores contemporary, historical, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives on the social psychology of death and dying. Cultural norms and institutional contexts are studied, along with the individual experience, and the ways in which our perspectives on death and dying influence our experiences of life and living.

Critically examines the place of the human body in contemporary society. Focuses on the social and cultural construction of bodies, including how they are gendered, racialized, sexualized, politicized, represented, colonized, contained, controlled, and inscribed. Discusses relationship between embodiment, lived experiences, and social action. Focuses on body politics in Western society and culture, especially the United States.

Examines sociological approaches to the understanding of emotions and the application of these approaches to work, learning, interpersonal relationships, health and illness, sports, and other aspects of everyday life.

Explores the relationship between consciousness, ideology, and political behaviors from voting to rebellion. Special attention is given to the lived experience and the identity interests that complicate the nexus of class position and political ideology. An introductory sociology course is recommended as preparation.

Explores historical and contemporary constructions of Latinx identities and experiences in U.S. Particular emphasis placed on transcultural social contexts, racial formations, and intersections with other identities including sexuality and gender. (Formerly U.S. Latina/o Identities: Centers and Margins).

Explores controversies in the sociology of sexuality. Focuses on tensions and disagreements that characterize debates over sex and society, and attempts to identify political and theoretical issues at stake in these debates.

Examines sex work in an historical and cultural context, considering how it has changed over time. Considers the relationship of pornography, exotic dance, and selling sex on the Internet to racialization, queer politics, globalization, and tourism. Employs theories and methods of cultural studies in rethinking historical debates on sex work.

Examines the nature and development of the capitalist world system since 1945. Emphasis is on the power of multinational corporations as managers of the world system and the response of states: role of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations.

Through comparative analysis of texts by several social theorists, explores the rise and consequences of capitalism. How has capitalism affected how humans understand and act in the world? How do oppressions along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and nations intersect with capitalism? Is resistance desirable and/or possible?

Along with studying Marx's anatomy of capitalist society, this course also explores the work of Marxist theorists from the early 20th century through the contemporary moment.

Fosters economic literacy among students who are not economics majors but are interested in the political and social ramifications of economic change. Emphasizes economic institutions and policy and is taught by case-study method, which requires active student participation.

Examines contemporary debates about development in the Third World: alternative meanings of development, recent work on the impact of colonial rule, how some economies have industrialized, ideas about agrarian change, and recent research on paths out of poverty. Students work in pairs to examine a development in one country since World War II. SOCY 15 recommended.

Explores sociological approaches to the quest for--and the realization of--social justice. Examines a range of approaches to such ongoing challenges as racism, sexism, gendered discrimination, classism, poverty, violence, militarism, environmental devastation, ableism, and ageism using non-fiction literature and biographical anthologies.

A survey of theories and systems of social stratification focusing on such phenomena as race, class, power, and prestige.

Examines the enduring and changing status of ethnic and racialized minority groups in the United States, such as Latina/os, African Americans, Asian Americans, indigenous peoples within the U.S., as intersecting, historically situated, and dynamically produced categories of social identity and organization. (Formerly Ethnic and Status Groups.)

Explores the enduring racial and economic legacies of slavery and colonialism in relation to contemporary social problems, with an emphasis on segregation, policing, the prison industrial complex, immigration, and borders.

Seminar focusing on readings of key texts and recent research papers on several dimensions of global inequality (material, health, gender, cultural, migration) to find innovative ways of understanding the connections among different dimensions of inequality and of visualizing inequality in digital media. Students prepare visual presentations on contemporary social inequalities suitable for an online (for example, http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/) or print atlas.

Through readings on social movements that span the 20th century, course examines the causes of popular mobilizations, their potential for rapid social change, and the theories developed to understand and explain their role in modern social life.

Analyzes access to clean water, both in the American West and global South. Reviews water quality, pivotal role of water in settlement and society, history and contemporary inequalities, water supplies, international conflict over water, climate change, and human use of water.

In the global North and South, inequalities in water and sanitation are issues of justice as much as income. One billion people worldwide lack safe water, 2.5 billion lack basic sanitation. Course explores: North-South comparison, water governance, human rights, poverty, climate justice, irrigation, and more.

Examines the history of women and work; women's current conditions of work and political, economic, and social factors affecting these conditions; means by which women may shape working conditions including contributing leadership, developing policies, building unity, and creating alliances.

Addresses how work is organized and shapes life changes. Covers: the history of paid work; the impact of technology; race/class/gender at work; professional and service work; work and family; collective responses to work; and challenges of work in a globalizing economy.

Historical and contemporary examination of urban life including community, race, geography, urban and suburban cultures and lifestyles, stratification, housing, crime, economic and environmental issues, demographic changes, and global urbanization.

Examines roles of emerging Latino/a majorities in urban centers across the U.S. Explores the Latinization of U.S. cities and various factors affecting the life chances of Latinos/as including, but not limited to, immigration, segregation, social movements, and other forms of political participation.

Explores the intersection of cities and the environment through the emerging field of urban environmental studies. Focuses on varied and often contested efforts at urban sustainability in recent history. Draws on literatures in environmental history, environmental and urban sociology, geography, political ecology, and cultural studies.

Explores how global cities have facilitated increasing integration of the diverse cultures and economies of the world. Using historical, sociological, and comparative methods, analyzes how these spaces both enable and constrain transnational flows of capital, labor, information, and culture.

Views problems in society not as given but as social constructs. Examines the ways in which conditions in society become identified and defined as problems and consequences that follow from such a process.

Taught on a rolling basis by faculty members with each offering varying by instructor. Topics are announced by the department.

An in-depth exploration of Disability Studies, an interdisciplinary field of research that seeks to question and critique dominant Western understandings of disability and to advance discussions around issues of intersectionality, equality, inclusionary politics of access, and social justice.

Concerns about environmental change, including global warming, threats to the ozone layer, and industrial pollution, raise questions about Third World development. Simple views of the relation between society and nature, such as blaming population growth, industrialization, or poor people, seem to preclude higher living standards. Uses debates and case studies to explore more subtle and optimistic views of social-natural relations.

Examines the roots, development, and political outcomes of black civil rights organizations during the Sixties. Explores social and structural forces, mobilization of black communities, strategies and tactics used, nature of the relationships between various civil rights organizations, unity and disunity among organizations, leadership gains, and impact on race relations in the U.S.

Why do famines happen? Why are some hungry and some over-fed? Recent advances in the understanding of food crises and chronic undernutrition are the focus of this course.

Modern society not only assaults nature, it does so in ways that reproduce existing social inequalities. This course reviews three types of contemporary environmental inequality (environmental racism, displacement, and privilege), and the processes that produced them, with a focus on industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of capitalism in Europe and the United States.

Examination of shifts in 20th- and 21st-century feminist theory and epistemology. Considers various deconstructive challenges to second wave feminism based on the politics of race, ethnicity, nation, sexuality, and class. Focus changes regularly.

Explores local dimensions of globalization, focusing on experiencing more global divisions of labor in both industrialized and developing countries. Themes include: economic integration and dislocation; new forms of governance; globalizing consumption and culture; gender; and popular resistance.

Provides for (department-sponsored) individual field study in the vicinity of the campus under the direct supervision of a faculty sponsor (as opposed to SOCY 198 where faculty supervision is by correspondence). Up to three such courses may be taken for credit in any one quarter. Ordinarily call numbers for this course will not be issued after the first week of instruction. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Provides for department-sponsored individual field study in the vicinity of campus under the direct supervision of a faculty sponsor. May not be counted toward major requirements. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Provides a means for a small group of students to study a particular topic in consultation with a faculty sponsor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Small group study of a particular topic in consultation with a faculty sponsor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Preparation of a senior thesis over one, two, or three quarters, beginning in any quarter. The senior thesis satisfies the comprehensive requirement. Course is for independent thesis research and writing. Courses may be taken consecutively or concurrently. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Preparation of a senior thesis over one, two, or three quarters, beginning in any quarter. The senior thesis satisfies the comprehensive requirement. Course is for independent thesis research and writing. Courses may be taken consecutively or concurrently. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Preparation of a senior thesis over one, two, or three quarters, beginning in any quarter. The senior thesis satisfies the comprehensive requirement. Course is for independent thesis research and writing. Courses may be taken consecutively or concurrently. Completion of course 195C (completion of the thesis) satisfies the W general education requirement. Prerequisite(s): Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Project practicum and evaluation are required for completion of major or minor in global information and social enterprise studies (GISES). Projects require approval in advance by the director of GISES. Completed projects must be uploaded electronically on the website or archive of the Everett Program.

Small seminars that focus on advanced topics in sociology. The pedagogical aims vary but these seminars often emphasize at least one of the following: close textual analysis, critical and analytical thinking, active learning, field research, advanced research methods, or advanced theory. Topics vary yearly; consult current course listings. Enrollment by application with selection based on appropriate background and by consent of instructor. Satisfies senior comprehensive requirement. Restricted to senior sociology majors.

Provides for (department-sponsored) individual study program off campus for which faculty supervision is not in person (e.g., supervision is by correspondence). Up to three such courses may be taken for credit in any one quarter. Ordinarily call numbers for this course will not be issued after the first week of instruction. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Advanced directed reading and research. Petitions may be obtained from the Sociology Department Office. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Advanced directed readingsand research. Petitions may be obtained from the Sociology Department Office. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.