This course provides you with a broad introduction to sociology, based on a series of varied, engaging, challenging books to explore the field. We will collectively develop our sociological imaginations by delving into scholarship from a variety of sociological areas of study, including: inequality, education, family, race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, criminal justice, organizations, and political economy. The course includes different theoretical approaches and research methodologies such as historical and comparative methods, interview and ethnographic methods, and use of simple quantitative surveys. This is intended to be primarily a reading, speaking-intensive and discussion-based course, by contrast to the other courses offered in our department. The assignments are deliberately designed to foster sociological analytic skills through varied formats.

In this class we will explore the different approaches to the subject of culture from a sociological perspective. This course is organized in three segments: 1) Sociological Theories of Culture. 2) A Cultural Sociology Approach to Love. 3) Why and Where culture matters. In the first segment we will learn how the field moved from an understanding of culture as ideas and ideals, to a conception of culture as practice. After three weeks of intensive surveying of foundational theories we will move on to the second segment. Here, we will put the enigma of love under scrutiny by looking at it from a cultural standpoint. We will situate love in capitalism investigating what love means for people from different walks of life. Following Eva Illouz, we will try to understand why love “hurts.” Right after an intensive engagement with emotions, we will investigate the cognitive approach to cultural sociology and determine if we can carve out a space for emotions in the cognitive realm. In the last segment we will look at multiple issues. With Hochschild’s Managed Heart we will focus on emotional labor and think about feeling rules that culture dictates, we will pursue culture in collective memory and politics. Most importantly we will think about how through culture societies build symbolic boundaries, and reproduce inequality. Last but not least, we will learn about socialization and a gap in cultural sociology: race. We will read the state of the art research on racial socialization and discuss what the discipline needs to do moving forward to fill this gap.

In this class we will study social movements from a cultural sociology perspective and focus on the emotional aspects of movements. The topics are informed by the contemporary moment and its struggles; racism, conservative movements, the continuing march to “Voting Rights,” climate change and the digital revolution. Our empirical materials are organized to reflect these themes. The readings are categorized in three clusters. First, we will cover the broad sociological theories about why social movements happen, how they are sustained, and if they succeed or fail. Here, we will emphasize the importance of taking a cultural perspective that is grounded in understanding participants’ motivations in being a part of social movement. Under the banner of boundaries, we will investigate how movements push against or remake social norms and demarcate between different groups. Second, we will look at Civil Rights Movement as an antecedent to Black Lives Matter. Third, we will focus on three case studies to continue our deep engagement with social movements: The Women’s March as a response to the rise of conservative Right and Trumpism, the Mindfulness Movement, and last but not least the role of the digital in the rise of transnational social movements.

In this class we will explore the link between politics and culture, and delve into political culture, in four subsets: civil society and power, political performance and communication, and collective action. Mabel Berezin defines political culture as the matrix of meanings embodied in expressive symbols, practices, and beliefs that constitute ordinary politics in a bounded collectivity. We will unpack this matrix. We will explore culture as a social force which can shift politics—another social force! in new directions. Our deep engagement will start with civil society and power, specifically the American understanding of community, to see how civic Republicanism and radical individualism undergird participation in social life. Here, we will deconstruct how Americans perceive themselves as political actors and members of a political community, and frame their participation in politics. In political performance and communication, we will explore several topics: political speeches, populism as a style, media as a realm of political performance, and museums. We will learn about the performative side of politics, with real life material as 2020 Election campaign will unfold during the semester! We will familiarize ourselves with narratives and deep stories told by people across the political spectrum, and question how embedded we are in these stories. In collective action, we will look at social media and mobilization, environmental philanthropy, religion in political activism and emotions! Here we will have the opportunity to look at a transnational case. By the end of the semester, you will see politics and culture everywhere!

What makes a space urban? How can we make sense of urbanism? How are cities different than the countryside, how are they interlinked? We will start our summer-long journey with these questions that have informed scholars of the urban, people who both theorized about and influenced the making of cities. In order to make sense of the urban phenomenon we will historicize it, as social scientists usually do. We will look at the idea of the polis, following it in medieval European towns and industrial cities. Reading visions of architects and designers will help us investigate the link between modernity, modernism, and cities, as well as the suburban dream and its critiques. Before the midterm we will see how people, who will of course be raced, classed and gendered fit in our historicized model of cities and discuss how our backgrounds influence, and contribute to the urban experience. In the second half, we will do some weaving and connect the world by looking at global cities, unequal urban development, and deconstruct the notion of development itself, through the cases of Turkey and Brazil. Lastly, we will tackle with gentrification, city as a space of consumption, and nostalgia.

Social theory helps us to make sense of the world we inhabit, revealing core logics of development, change, meaning and domination which structure the messy human experience. This class works closely with texts by a handful of great theorists who have created particularly illuminating, even world-changing ways of seeing. Reading extracts from Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Gramsci, DuBois, De Beauvoir, Fanon, Patricia Hill Collins, Foucault, Stuart Hall and Baudrillard we will concentrate on readings around notions of power: economic, racist, colonial, patriarchal, bureaucratic, and discursive. This course will improve your ability to think and read critically, able to better recognize and evaluate assumptions underlying “common sense” statements about how societies work. We will closely read excerpts from the original texts, and study empirical research which benefit from these theories. This will help us link the seemingly old theories to pressing contemporary issues. Be ready to ponder what Marx has to say about gentrification, how Gramsci would react to Colin Kaepernick, and what Weber has to say about the power of your work ethic.