Sociology/Anthropology

Courses

SOAN 115: Introduction to Anthropology: Culture & Diversity

Credits 4
Introduces and critically examines selected approaches to understanding human diversity. Drawing on ethnographic studies, develops perspectives on how people cohere as groups, construct meaning, assert and resist influence and power, and orient themselves to a shifting terrain of images and relationships both global and local. Weekly film session required.

SOAN 140: Urban Sociology

Credits 4
This course will introduce students to classic and contemporary urban social theories and empirical research on pressing urban issues such as segregation, environmental injustice, suburbanization, transportation, inequality. We will also examine the forces that shape urban space in ways that perpetuate inequality for African Americans.

SOAN 212: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature

Credits 4
Every offering of Interdisciplinary Approaches To Literature explores a different category of texts (such as folklore, urban legends, or biographies) using approaches from more than one academic discipline (such as Theatre, Anthropology, or History).

SOAN 215: Identities & Social Movements

Credits 4

Explores contemporary social movements organized around gender, sexuality, ethnicity and place. Examines the pivotal role of culture in shaping identities and structuring relations of inequality. Explores empirical case studies of social movements and theories that have emerged to grapple with the place of these movements in creating social change. Particular attention to tensions between class-based analyses of social movements.

SOAN 216: Theory through Ethnography

Credits 4
Considers the time-honored practice of Ethnography, both as fieldwork and as textual form, that has traditionally defined cultural anthropology and qualitative sociology. Examines the politics, poetics and ethics of ethnographic research and writing, pushing beyond modernist assumptions about ethnographic fieldwork as objective scientific research. Reading and discussion of ethnographic texts / classical and contemporary, conventional and experimental / as well as critiques of ethnographic research and writing. Required of all SoAn majors, and restricted to SoAn majors and those who are seriously considering SoAn as their major.

SOAN 217: Foundations in Social Thought

Credits 4
The disciplines of sociology and anthropology as we know them today came into being during an exceptionally generative period between about 1870 and 1930. During this seminal time, theoretical constructs regarding the nature of the mind/self, social interaction and organization, power dynamics and inequalities, and cultural forms and functions were developed. Consequently, key ideas and insights from this earlier period continue to inform anthropological and sociological research and writing in the 21st century.

SOAN 244: Tourism in Japan & the Pacific

Credits 3
This course looks at Japan within the context of global processes and practices of tourism. Students will learn to employ social science perspectives to consider the political-economic, socio-cultural and environmental implications of tourist practices both in Japan and in the wider Pacific region, particularly Hawaii.

SOAN 309: Sociology of Social Media

Credits 3
This course will introduce students to debates about the nature and effects of social media. How do online and offline worlds relate? What are the social consequences of new communications technologies? Students will learn the theories and methods that sociologists use to study online social interaction.

SOAN 310: Media & Surveillance in Contemporary Society

Credits 3
Examining the intersection of recent digital technologies and an intensifying social gaze on individuals, populations, spaces and activities, this seminar focuses on behavior as monitored. The course considers how surveillance practices serve as instruments of social political discipline, market competition, knowledge circulation, risk reduction, social sorting and resource management, as well as fostering new forms of social participation and individual expression.

SOAN 311: Anthropology of the Middle East

Credits 4
Using anthropological approaches to the Middle East to combat commonplace narratives of timeless antagonisms, irrational and violent religiosity, and prehistoric misogyny. Historicizing and problematizing these assumptions opens us up to different kinds of questions: not, why is this region so much more violent than other places, but why do we consider this a region at all? What counts as Middle East and why? It aims to provide you with the tools to think critically about news coming out of the Middle East including a basic background on Islam, questions of gender, Israel-Palestine and the Arab Spring and its fallout.

SOAN 314: Colonialism, Post Colonialism & Settler Colonialism

Credits 4
We live in a postcolonial world — or is it still a colonial one? This course will explore the different forms that colonialism has taken across the globe. It will also interrogate the historical relationship between colonialism and anthropology. Is it possible to practice anthropology today without reproducing it as a colonial discourse?

SOAN 320: Peoples/Cultures Selected Area

Credits 4
Explores patterns of social life in a selected region, including historical circumstances, social formations and case studies of cultural beliefs and practices. Seeks to understand the gaze through which the region has been viewed by observers over time, and how various groups have understood, defined and responded to their own experience.

SOAN 324: Anthropology of Sound

Credits 4
Much of human life is arranged around sounds and silences. Practices of listening, capacities for hearing and interpreting sound can define who we are. This course examines how anthropologists have thought about sound. Coursework is divided between readings, media content, and a project to create a podcast episode.

SOAN 333: Medical Anthropology & Global Health

Credits 3
This course critically explores the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, clinical medicine, and local beliefs and practices in emerging regimes of global health. Drawing primarily on ethnographic case studies, the class considers how practices, technologies, and institutions of biomedicine engage established and emerging local ones. In particular, students will examine how inequalities of social power influence the circulation of biomedicine, the practice of humanitarian care, and the experience of health, illness and healing. A core focus is to evaluate the complex impacts and outcomes of medical and public health interventions.

SOAN 335: Health, Medicine & Society

Credits 4
Examines health, illness and medical care with a focus on both the social organization of health and health care institutions, and on the experience of illness and healing. Explores discourses of health and illness drawn on by professionals and patients, and the impact of social position on health and treatment.

SOAN 341: Contemporary Social Thought

Credits 4
Explores emerging trends in social theory and their relation to classical theory. Each year emphasizes a different problem such as power and culture, structure and agency, or determinism and anti-essentialism. Readings and discussion focus on developing the students' ability to recognize subtle differences that define theoretical perspective.

SOAN 345: Social Research Methods

Credits 4

Primarily for Sociology/Anthropology majors. Introduces micro-social qualitative and focus group approaches in social research, preparing students to carry out original research projects in other Sociology/Anthropology courses.

SOAN 347: Fieldwork & Ethnographic Methods

Credits 4

A self-designed ethnographic research project is carried out during the semester, with the members of the Practicum consulting with the group about their projects. Completes one of the options for the departmental methods requirement.

SOAN 349: Du Bois and Sociology

Credits 4
W.E.B. du Bois pioneered a liberatory sociology of emancipation grounded in rigorous empirical investigation of social problems. In this course, we will examine the Du Boisian roots of American sociology, studying some of his most influential texts for insights into how sociology can address important current public conversations about dismantling racist and exploitative structures of oppression.

SOAN 356: Deviance, Transgression & Social Control

Credits 4
In seeking to understand significant departures from social norms, explores how deviance has been understood through a variety of perspectives, and the implications of these views for society and for those identified as "deviant." Significant attention to issues of social power and resistance, and changing forms of social control.

SOAN 365: Women, Gender & Sexuality

Credits 4
This course critically examines the discursive construction of a presumed natural link between sex, gender and desire, emphasizing connections between the naturalization of heterosexuality and the formation of nations and empires.

SOAN 366: World Ethnography

Credits 4
In this course, students will read ethnographies that explore the relationships between human and non-human animals around the globe. Using a cross cultural lens, the readings will interrogate notions of the animal as shaped by concepts of what it means to be human.

SOAN 368: Economy of Development: Discourse and Desire

Credits 4
Using an anthropological lens, examines "development" as a type of discourse that formed under specific historical and sociological conditions. Examines the way relations between nations are imagined, the kinds of institutions that are born in the context of development, and the roles of those institutions in structuring power relations.

SOAN 372: Sustainability in the Anthropocene

Credits 4
This course engages with a variety of practices, understandings and discourses associated with sustainability, nature, the environment and the Anthropocene in our local community and academic work. The class will discuss ethics of community-based research, collaboratively formulate research questions and approaches for a final project investigating a community sustainability initiative.

SOAN 382: Emerging Perspectives in Anthrozoology

Credits 4

This course will explore human animal interactions drawing upon readings in philosophy, biology and anthropology. The course will address a range of questions pertinent to the emerging field of anthrozoology including how the animal is represented in social theory, the grounding, or lack thereof, of distinctions between humans and non-human animals in the field of ethics, and how socio-historical and cultural differences shape interactions between humans and non-human animals. The course is open to all levels.

SOAN 487: Senior Capstone Experience: Research Seminar

Credits 4
Designed to enable seniors to make significant progress toward completing a senior paper or project or preparing for a comprehensive examination. Also addresses the transition to the worlds of work, graduate school, family and community.

SOAN 488: Senior Capstone Experience: Thesis

Credits 4
Working closely with an assigned member of the department, Seniors complete work begun in the Capstone course. Note: Credits for this course do not count toward requirements for the Major.