Sociology/Anthropology

Introduces students to the sociological perspective and focuses on the connections between major social institutions and social inequality.

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.

This course will ponder the relation of crime to housing affordability and wage stagnation. Karl Marx described how in nineteenth century England large scale farming huddled laborers into miserable dwellings where dear rents and minimal wages fostered crime. Dubbed “improvements”, these evictions also furnished lavish new places of business and residence for the wealthy. This course will consider actual and historical examples of “improvements” and crime, and their "intersectional" outcomes.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.