Sociology (SOC)

What are the influences that shape who we are and how we think? Why do people act the way they do? How can we better understand why people's lives take certain paths? The answers to these questions are central to our well-being as individuals and as a society. In this course, you will learn how sociologists approach and answer these questions. During the semester, you will explore our society through a variety of lines of inquiry. What is the link between individuals and their culture? How is social interaction structured and how does this affect our behavior? What is inequality? How do institutions influence our lives? The over-arching purpose of the course is to cultivate your "sociological imagination," which can then be used to better understand yourself and your place in the larger world.

The United States is beset by many serious social problems, such as crime and deviance, drug abuse and addiction, domestic violence, hunger and poverty, and racial/ethnic discrimination. How do we think about these problems in ways that lead to helpful solutions? Sociology offers concepts, theories, and empirical research useful for understanding and addressing important problems in society. This course illuminates key social problems by introducing basic sociological concepts, theories and research, and applying them to specific problems, such as poverty and economic inequality, racial segregation, gender and educational inequality, and the decline of social capital. Students will learn to take a sociological perspective not only in examining the causes, consequences, and solutions to some of society's most troubling social problems, but also in developing their critical analysis of key social problems.

The family is often agreed to be the primary and most fundamental of social institutions. It is within this institution that early socialization and care-giving usually take place, and therefore, many of our ideas about the world are closely tied to our families. This course will give students the opportunity to learn about the diverse forms the family has taken over time and across different groups. This knowledge will be useful in examining the ongoing debate about the place of the family in social life. By taking a sociological approach to learning about the family and by gaining knowledge about national family trends and patterns in the U.S., this course will give students the theoretical and empirical tools for understanding how family life is linked to the social structure; to economic, cultural, and historical events and transitions; and to societal factors like race, class, and gender.

We live in a society populated and dominated by organizations. Throughout our lives we engage with many different types of organizations: hospitals, schools, businesses, government agencies, religious institutions. It has been argued that the very essence of modern society is the rise of large scale formal organizations, which can help us by creating efficiency, predictability, and fairness, but can also trap us in an iron cage of numbing bureaucratic rationalization. The objective of this course is to help you analyze and assess the good, bad and ugly about modern organizations. It specifically aims to provide analytical tools and case studies to help you: 1) understand how different kinds of organizations function 2) assess organizational effectiveness and failure, and 3) evaluate the role of organizations in a globalizing world. Broadening our understanding of organizations can facilitate our ability to both negotiate our way through organizations and, perhaps most importantly, try to change them

The objective of this course is to explore how and why individuals and social groups rebel against authority, particularly in risky situations when rebellion is likely to incur significant personal and collective costs. This course will investigate the conditions that stoke rebellion against immoral and oppressive power structures, shared conditions, and social norms; how we know when authorities are acting immorally or unjustly; why injustice and illegitimacy only fuel rebellion in some cases and induce conformity in others; the various forms that resistance and rebellion can take; and the factors that shape rebellion's varied forms, such as exit, sabotage, protest, withholding, reclamation, violent struggle, and revolution. The empirical topics covered will address a range of rebellion under tyranny, including but not limited to rebellion during slavery in the United States, rebellion against Nazi power and the Holocaust during World War II, and resistance to colonialism and imperialism.

Sociology 10672 / 20672 is a course designed to introduce undergraduate students to the nature and functions of religious beliefs and institutions in modern societies, with a particular emphasis on conditions in the contemporary United States. Throughout the course, a distinctively sociological perspective is employed to evaluate claims about the viability of religion in what has been called a "post-traditional" world. If in this age God is not dead, how does one account for the notable absence of religious values as animating forces outside the private lives of individuals? If God is long gone, on the other hand, what explains rapid growth in the memberships of conservative religious bodies, or the high levels of interest in non-Western spiritual practices — not to mention a global resurgence of religious particularism? These and other questions from the sociology of religion will be addressed in a survey of the field and a consideration of different American religious traditions. Lectures will cover, among other subjects, individual religious experience; social mechanisms of conversion and commitment; civil religions; religious inspirations for, or impediments to, social change; and the varied processes of secularization.

The overarching goal of this course is to provide students with a working knowledge of social psychology and, with that knowledge, to increase awareness of ourselves, the social world around us, and the connections between the two. This is a course about social interaction - how the self shapes and is shaped by others, how we interact in and with groups and social structures, and how we perceive the world around us. Because the subject of the course is the very social interactions in which we are immersed, it is expected that students will develop the habit of applying social psychological concepts to everyday life.

Introduction to Criminology provides students with an overview of the sociological study of law making, law breaking and the resulting social responses. In this class we not only look at a variety of crimes, but we also discuss the varying methods sociologists use to collect, interpret and evaluate data, as well as how we theorize about crime and punishment. We address questions such as "Why are some people or groups labeled as criminal, while others are not?" "Do laws in both their construction and enforcement serve everyone's interests equally?" "How can the communities in which people are embedded be considered as criminogenic?" "How are poverty, race, gender and other social factors related to crime?"

When people think about sexuality, they often adopt a biological view—seeing sexuality as “driven” by hormones and nature. This course adopts a different approach by viewing sexuality through the lens of sociology—as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, and ideologies. The course will focus on examining three sociological aspects of sexuality: 1) The social, historical, and cultural factors that shape sexual behaviors, desires, identities, and communities; 2) The ways in which sex and sexuality are constantly regulated and contested at multiple levels of society, including within families, schools, workplaces, and religious and political institutions; and 3) The sources, causes, and effects of sexual inequality. While our focus will be on sexuality, we will also study how other identities (including gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence and affect it. Students will be encouraged to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about sex and sexualities and to formulate critical perspectives on issues pertaining to sexuality in today’s public discourses. This course is sex-positive in that it assumes that knowledge about sexuality is empowering, not dangerous. The readings and discussions will be frank, and students will be assisted in developing a language for and comfort level with discussing a wide range of sexual topics in a respectful and sociological way. In the process, students will be challenged to improve their critical thinking, researching, writing, and public speaking skills.

Most Americans think of the “inner city” as a place of misery, danger, and despair. Why do most American cities have racially segregated areas dominated by concentrated poverty? What are the lives of inner city residents like? Why do the legal, political, economic, and educational institutions that serve these communities struggle so mightily to improve the lives of inner city residents? In this course, we will address all of these questions by viewing all five seasons of The Wire, David Simon’s epic tale of life in inner city Baltimore. Sociological theory and research will serve as powerful tools to help students “decode” The Wire, and better understand of the social forces that create and sustain inner city poverty, violence, and disorder.

An introduction to the seminar method of instruction accenting the organization and expression of arguments suggested by readings in sociology. Each of the seminars treats a particular sociological topic, such as family life, social problems, the urban crisis, poverty, etc.

What are the influences that shape who we are and how we think? Why do people act the way they do? How can we better understand why people's lives take certain paths? The answers to these questions are central to our well-being as individuals and as a society. In this course, you will learn how sociologists approach and answer these questions. During the semester, you will explore our society through a variety of lines of inquiry. What is the link between individuals and their culture? How is social interaction structured and how does this affect our behavior? What is inequality? How do institutions influence our lives? The over-arching purpose of the course is to cultivate your "sociological imagination," which can then be used to better understand yourself and your place in the larger world.

"Introduction to Data Science" is an introductory course that will provide an overview of data science from both a computer science perspective and a social science perspective; This course will orient students to the field, to key concepts, to the types of questions addressed, to the technical aspects of data science and to the process of making sense of data.

Psychiatry and mental healthcare have been the target of criticism and controversy for decades. Common critiques are that the field is not grounded in medical science, that it pathologizes normal problems in living, or that it is a method of social control. This course will focus on the social movements that have been critical of mental healthcare from the second half of the twentieth century to today. We will begin by considering questions such as: What is the proper role of mental healthcare? What is a social movement? What is the relationship between mental healthcare and politics? Then we will shift to discussing particular social movements including antipsychiatry, Mad Pride, the emergence of the concepts of disability and neurodiversity as alternatives to pathology, and other examples of service-user led activism. The goal of the course will be to better understand the ways that psychiatry has abused it power and imagine changes that could be made to the system to improve the lives of those who suffer from mental health conditions.

The United States is beset by many serious social problems such as educational inequality, extreme poverty alongside unparalleled abundance, crime and deviance, health disparities, mass incarceration, and the persistence of discrimination along lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, gender, and sexuality. Course materials are designed to engage student learning, illustrate the distinctive features of the sociological perspective, and to start you thinking sociologically about yourself and the broader world. To think sociologically requires you to recognize that our contemporary world, with its enduring cultural, political, and economic institutions, is as much a social product as we are. In this course, students will learn to take a sociological perspective not only in examining the causes, consequences, and solutions to some of society’s most troubling social problems, but also in taking a critical look at their own perceptions of problems.

This class is an introduction to the way that sociologists study the cultural dimensions of the social world. Culture is here defined as all objects, ideas, and practices that people attach some meaning to. We will survey contemporary sociological approaches to analyzing culture, and discuss the way that culture and meanings are produced, disseminated, interpreted, and used by social actors. We will investigate how cultural objects are produced in mass media industries, how social boundaries and social hierarchies (such as those based on gender, race, and class) are created through the consolidation of cultural categories, and how social practices related to the consumption of cultural objects have become a central facet of life in modern societies.

This course examines the socio-histories, movement, and settlement patterns of racial minorities in the U.S. The course will focus on how race and racial imaginaries shape the movement and settlement of racial minorities. It will include deep examinations of these mobility patterns and how they are constructed and articulated through laws, policies, and social arrangements. Special attention will be paid to the racialization of the United States, American-ness as whiteness, and the consequences for the social and physical landscape. And finally, the course will consider how the racial construction of America is manifested and buttressed through the built environment and the consequences.

Many have claimed that the American educational system is the "great equalizer." In other words, the educational system gives everyone a chance to prosper in American society regardless of their social origins. In this course, we will explore the validity of this claim. We will consider questions such as: 1) Does our educational system promote social mobility or social reproduction? 2) How has the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational performance changed in the last few decades? 3) How do social class and gender shape the kinds of educational experiences students have? 4) How does educational policy influence the kinds of experiences kids have in school? Can policy reduce inequality?

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

The family is often agreed to be the primary and most fundamental of social institutions. It is within this institution that early socialization and care-giving usually take place, and therefore, many of our ideas about the world are closely tied to our families. This course will give students the opportunity to learn about the diverse forms the family has taken over time and across different groups. This knowledge will be useful in examining the ongoing debate about the place of the family in social life. By taking a sociological approach to learning about the family and by gaining knowledge about national family trends and patterns in the U.S., this course will give students the theoretical and empirical tools for understanding how family life is linked to the social structure, to economic, cultural, and historical events and transitions, and to societal factors like race, class, and gender. Enrollment questions should be directed to Sociology's DUS at mthoma13@nd.edu.

How is the chronic stress of poverty related to negative health outcomes? Why are infant mortality rates higher among some groups than others? What is the relationship between gender and mental health care? We will address these and several other important questions as we discuss the complex and dynamic intersections of health, medicine, and society. In this class, we also pay particular attention to differential access to health care among various groups in society, changing perceptions of health and medicine over time, and the role of social networks in both health behaviors as well as the diffusion of illness.

We live in a society populated and dominated by organizations. Throughout our lives we engage with many different types of organizations: hospitals, schools, businesses, government agencies, religious institutions. It has been argued that the very essence of modern society is the rise of large scale formal organizations, which can help us by creating efficiency, predictability, and fairness, but can also trap us in an iron cage of numbing bureaucratic rationalization. The objective of this course is to help you analyze and assess the good, bad and ugly about modern organizations. It specifically aims to provide analytical tools and case studies to help you: 1) understand how different kinds of organizations function 2) assess organizational effectiveness and failure, and 3) evaluate the role of organizations in a globalizing world. Broadening our understanding of organizations can facilitate our ability to both negotiate our way through organizations and, perhaps most importantly, try to change them

The objective of this course is to explore how and why individuals and social groups rebel against authority, particularly in risky situations when rebellion is likely to incur significant personal and collective costs. This course will investigate the conditions that stoke rebellion against immoral and oppressive power structures, shared conditions, and social norms; how we know when authorities are acting immorally or unjustly; why injustice and illegitimacy only fuel rebellion in some cases and induce conformity in others; the various forms that resistance and rebellion can take; and the factors that shape rebellion's varied forms, such as exit, sabotage, protest, withholding, reclamation, violent struggle, and revolution. The empirical topics covered will address a range of rebellion under tyranny, including but not limited to rebellion during slavery in the United States, rebellion against Nazi power and the Holocaust during World War II, and resistance to colonialism and imperialism.

This course is an introduction to environmental sociology, the sociology of food, and Catholic social teachings on creation, solidarity, human dignity and rights, and social justice as they relate to the environment and food issues. The course has two directly linked central purposes. One is to learn descriptive and analytical sociological perspectives on environmental and food issues, as well as related matters of agriculture, globalization, consumerism, rural America, health, social movements, and human futures. A second purpose is to learn Catholic social teachings on the environment and food issues, in order to deepen our capacity to reflect normatively from a particular moral perspective about crucial social problems. Achieving these two purposes will require us recurrently to engage the sociological and the Catholic perspectives and contributions in mutually informative and critical conversation. This is fundamentally a sociology course, but one in which Catholic social ethics stand front and center. In other words, this course will engage in multiple, ongoing exercises of "reflexivity," engaging the sociological imagination, issues of environment and food, and Catholic social teachings - to consider what possible fruitful understandings each may provide for and about the others. Students need not be Catholic (or even religious) to benefit from this course, but everyone must be open to learning about and reflecting upon Catholic ethical teachings as they relate to the environment and food. FILM LAB IS REQUIRED, SOC 21666 This course will explore a number of interconnected substantive issues, descriptively, analytically, and normatively. These will include technological development, energy consumption, global warming/climate change, neoliberal capitalism, interests of nation states, corporate power, the role of mass media, population dynamics, the maldistribution of wealth, political decision-making, the status of science, ocean environments, extreme weather, sustainable development, environmentalist movements, agribusiness, nutrition, food supply systems, hunger and obesity, organics, fair trade, localism, agrarianism, human dignity, the common good, the option for the poor, the universal destiny of the earth's goods, creation care, and the moral goods of solidarity, subsidiarity, and participation, among other relevant topics.

Sociology 10672 / 20672 is a course designed to introduce undergraduate students to the nature and functions of religious beliefs and institutions in modern societies, with a particular emphasis on conditions in the contemporary United States. Throughout the course, a distinctively sociological perspective is employed to evaluate claims about the viability of religion in what has been called a "post-traditional" world. If in this age God is not dead, how does one account for the notable absence of religious values as animating forces outside the private lives of individuals? If God is long gone, on the other hand, what explains rapid growth in the memberships of conservative religious bodies, or the high levels of interest in non-Western spiritual practices — not to mention a global resurgence of religious particularism? These and other questions from the sociology of religion will be addressed in a survey of the field and a consideration of different American religious traditions. Lectures will cover, among other subjects, individual religious experience; social mechanisms of conversion and commitment; civil religions; religious inspirations for, or impediments to, social change; and the varied processes of secularization.

The overarching goal of this course is to provide students with a working knowledge of social psychology and, with that knowledge, to increase awareness of ourselves, the social world around us, and the connections between the two. This is a course about social interaction - how the self shapes and is shaped by others, how we interact in and with groups and social structures, and how we perceive the world around us. Because the subject of the course is the very social interactions in which we are immersed, it is expected that students will develop the habit of applying social psychological concepts to everyday life.

Introduction to Criminology provides students with an overview of the sociological study of law making, law breaking and the resulting social responses. In this class we not only look at a variety of crimes, but we also discuss the varying methods sociologists use to collect, interpret and evaluate data, as well as how we theorize about crime and punishment. We address questions such as "Why are some people or groups labeled as criminal, while others are not?" "Do laws in both their construction and enforcement serve everyone's interests equally?" "How can the communities in which people are embedded be considered as criminogenic?" "How are poverty, race, gender and other social factors related to crime?"

We are living through a watershed moment in United States history. Structural racism is at the forefront of the national discourse. Yet, the threat that racism holds on our nation's most cherished ideals of democracy and justice is hardly new. Generations of activists, scholars, and everyday people have fought and persevered to bring about social, cultural, and policy change. This course engages deeply with topics relevant to the national discourse on racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. The first part of the course examines key concepts, focusing on the social construction of race and ethnicity, prejudice, and discrimination. The second part reviews the historical experiences of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The third and final part of the course centers on four critical issues that are especially relevant in 2020: (1) immigration; (2) political disenfranchisement; (3) racial and ethnic disparities in health; and (4) racism in the criminal justice system.

When people think about sexuality, they often adopt a biological view—seeing sexuality as “driven” by hormones and nature. This course adopts a different approach by viewing sexuality through the lens of sociology—as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, and ideologies. The course will focus on examining three sociological aspects of sexuality: 1) The social, historical, and cultural factors that shape sexual behaviors, desires, identities, and communities; 2) The ways in which sex and sexuality are constantly regulated and contested at multiple levels of society, including within families, schools, workplaces, and religious and political institutions; and 3) The sources, causes, and effects of sexual inequality. While our focus will be on sexuality, we will also study how other identities (including gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence and affect it. Students will be encouraged to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about sex and sexualities and to formulate critical perspectives on issues pertaining to sexuality in today’s public discourses. This course is sex-positive in that it assumes that knowledge about sexuality is empowering, not dangerous. The readings and discussions will be frank, and students will be assisted in developing a language for and comfort level with discussing a wide range of sexual topics in a respectful and sociological way. In the process, students will be challenged to improve their critical thinking, researching, writing, and public speaking skills.

Most Americans think of the "inner city" as a place of misery, danger, and despair. Why do most American cities have racially segregated areas dominated by concentrated poverty? What are the lives of inner-city residents like? Why do the legal, political, economic, and educational institutions that serve these communities struggle so mightily to improve the lives of inner-city residents? In this course, we will address all of these questions by viewing all five seasons of The Wire, David Simon's epic tale of life in inner-city Baltimore. Sociological theory and research will serve as powerful tools to help students "decode" The Wire, and better understand the institutional forces that created and perpetuate inner city poverty, violence, and disorder.

This course examines representations of race, ethnicity, and ideology in the American cinema through a sociological lens. We will focus on understanding how film reflects and directs prevailing cultural norms and attitudes surrounding racial and ethnic relations. One goal is to uncover how racial and ethnic relations are reified on the silver screen through storytelling techniques such as narrative, style, aesthetics, and mise en scène. We will analyze the sociological context of each film to better understand the evolution of cinematic representations of race and ethnicity and what they mean for race relations and inequality in the broader society. This course will cover the American cinematic treatment of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Italian Americans through feature length screenings and clips of particularly poignant scenes.

Algorithms and data increasingly influence our behavior, steer resources, and inform institutional decisions that affect our everyday lives. This course will examine the social forces that shape what information gets recorded in databases and how algorithms are constructed and used. It will also introduce various approaches for assessing how algorithms and big data impact the social world. Along the way, we'll tackle important questions raised by these technological developments: What opportunities and challenges emerge when machine learning is applied to data about people? How should we evaluate whether algorithms are better or worse than the systems they replace? How might algorithms shape our agency, relationships, and access to opportunity?

Required of students registered for Prof. Christian Smith's Understanding Societies course, this lab involves viewing and discussing a series of documentary films related to the concepts and theories learned in class, about important contemporary issues related mostly to technology and the environment, such as global warming and climate change, gene editing, artificial intelligence, social surveillance, corporate power, social inequality, and the human effects of social media.

This is a required lab for students taking SOC 20666; Environment, Food, and Society.

The science we produce helps us understand the world. But how does the world around us impact how we produce and understand science? Whatever our social lives outside of the lab, in the laboratory workspace, we consider our work to be largely devoid of bias and influence from the outside world. However, the science we encounter is a product of the scientists who have gathered this knowledge - the answer to the “why” depends on “who” came up with it. The goal of this course is to consider “who”, “what”, “when”, and “where” as important questions that affect the scientist, the science they produce, and the way this science is introduced to society. We will be reading scientific literature alongside texts from the discipline of science and technology studies, focusing on the language used by science. Specifically, we will work together to uncover the history and context surrounding commonly used metaphors and critically analyze them through the lenses of race, gender, disability, and indigeneity. We will think about how these word choices impact our scientific hypotheses and interpretations, and sometimes even determines who gets to ask.

Many social science classes identify important social problems but do not offer concrete pathways to addressing them. Conversely, classes on the science of happiness emphasize concrete positive actions but focus only on what you can do to improve your own personal fulfillment. This class is different. Instead of focusing on individual happiness or self-improvement, we’ll focus on how we can enhance the social good – our shared interests and the well-being of our communities. In this class, you will become a force for social good. What can the social sciences teach us about how to work in our communities to encourage trust, belonging, care, or mutual understanding? What does social science reveal about what actually works to promote stronger communities and encourage human flourishing for others? In a world grappling with complex social challenges, this course empowers you to move beyond the paralysis of not knowing what to do. We take a positive sociology approach, learning from successful cases of social progress. You will learn how change happens and how you can make a difference in your communities, from friend groups and dorms to Notre Dame and beyond. You will reflect on your values, engage with multiple visions of the “social good,” and develop practical skills in creative problem-solving, communication, and policy analysis. Through hands-on group projects, expert guest speakers, and real-world problem hacks, you will learn how to craft actionable solutions to social issues. Adopting a “small wins” approach that celebrates positive steps forward, this course aims to have students leave with a deeper understanding of social good and also the tools and confidence to make meaningful, lasting impact. Throughout the class, you will try your hand at different sociological methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups) and kinds of interventions (e.g., accompaniment, policy briefs, or storytelling), engaging the broader Notre Dame community as an active learning environment. For your final group project, you will take what you’ve learned and design an intervention to make a difference around a social problem you feel passionate about solving. This class will offer students opportunities to engage constructively with normative questions through the lens of Catholic Social Thought. Through readings, iterative reflections, and hands-on practical experiences, you will engage with normative questions about our moral obligations to others and how a good community ought to be. You will develop a deeper understanding of sociology and the Catholic tradition by exploring key questions at their intersection, such as dignity, subsidiarity, solidarity, and accompaniment. Students’ discernment of their own normative vision for the social good will be coupled with social scientific understanding of what practical actions could help students become a force for that vision, helping you begin to act in ways that help make us a better community.

What does it mean to explore gender through a sociological lens? Why does gender inequality persist in contemporary society? What can we do to advocate for social change? In this course we will discuss gender in families, politics, and history. The class will analyze gender at an individual, interactional, and institutional level. How gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality will be the bedrock of our learning together. The course will intellectually challenge students to continue becoming sociological scholars, educated activists, and justice-seeking individuals.

The United Nations estimates that an unprecedented 71 million people around the world have been forced to flee from their respective homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, half of whom are under the age of 18. Media and social science scholarship represent refugees as passive recipients of western aid and avoid critical examination of the global and historical conditions that create "refugees."This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies (CRS) to re-conceptualize the refugee not as a problem to be solved but as a site of social and political critiques. CRS illuminates the processes of colonization, war, and displacement. This course examines militarism and migration as well as refugee voices written in their own words. We will assess a variety of sources, including oral history, ethnography, art, graphic novels, and interdisciplinary scholarship from humanities and social science.

This class will survey the various historical and contemporary dimensions of Asian American experiences including immigration & integration, family & community dynamics, ethnic/gender/class identity, as well as transnational and diasporic experiences. We will explore contemporary and historical issues of racism, the model minority myth, inter-generational relationships, and the educational experiences of Asian Americans. To accomplish this, our class will pose such questions as: Who is Asian American? How did racism create Chinatown? Is there an Asian advantage? Coursework includes essays based on topics of your choice, presentations, and a creative narrative.

This course offers a critical examination of what it means to be an immigrant or child of immigrants through scholarly works, memoirs, blogs, and popular journalism. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are becoming an increasing and emergent demographic of American society. In major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they comprise over 50% of the population. This course focuses on how immigrants and the children of immigrants experience the United States. How are immigrants changing the US racial and ethnic structure? How do their experiences differ given varying legal statuses? How is the second generation becoming American? We will explore these questions through readings that focus on family, religion, education, dating and sexuality. This course will include a community based learning component where students will work with immigrant serving organizations. Students will have the option to teach citizenship classes or to work with immigrant children. Service will be 2-3 hours per week outside of class.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a crucial skill in the workforce, especially with the advent and accessibility of generative AI technologies. From intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants to automated content creation and sentiment analysis, NLP applications are transforming industries and redefining how we interact with technology. Mastery of NLP techniques and tools not only opens doors to careers in the technology sector but also equips students to contribute to innovations that shape our future. Language Processing in Practice is a hands-on course designed to introduce students to the fundamental theory and applications of NLP, with a special emphasis on working with large language models, generative AI, and the Hugging Face ecosystem. The course focuses on practical techniques for processing, analyzing, generating, and understanding human language data. Students will explore key topics such as text preprocessing, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, machine translation, and text generation. The curriculum places a strong emphasis on modern NLP libraries and frameworks like NLTK, spaCy, and particularly Hugging Face Transformers. Through a series of projects and assignments, students will gain experience in building NLP applications, creating word embeddings with pre-trained large language models, and generating human-like text using generative AI models. Basic proficiency in Python programming is required.

We are living through a watershed moment in United States history. Structural racism is at the forefront of the national discourse. Yet, the threat that racism holds on our nation's most cherished ideals of democracy and justice is hardly new. Generations of activists, scholars, and everyday people have fought and persevered to bring about social, cultural, and policy change. This course engages deeply with topics relevant to the national discourse on racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. The first part of the course examines key concepts, focusing on the social construction of race and ethnicity, prejudice, and discrimination. The second part reviews the historical experiences of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The third and final part of the course centers on four critical issues that are especially relevant in 2020: (1) immigration; (2) political disenfranchisement; (3) racial and ethnic disparities in health; and (4) racism in the criminal justice system.

Sociology 30900 is a course that is meant to introduce the undergraduate students who enroll, most of whom are majors in sociology, to the origins, development, and uses of sociological theory. In that pursuit, the course seeks to explain how theoretical ideas emerge, how perspectives are framed, and how vantage points for viewing society and its operations shift over time. To achieve these ends, special attention is devoted to prominent thinkers, both "classical" and contemporary, in the history of social thought, from the early critics of modern industrialism like Karl Marx to ironic commentators on present-day social practices such as Erving Goffman. "Foundations of Sociological Theory" is also a "writing-intensive" course in the liberal-arts curriculum. This means that students in the class, at the same time that they are reading and studying theory, will work on improving their skills as writers of clear, objective, and persuasive prose.

Sociology 30902 is designed to provide an overview of research methods in the social sciences. Topics covered include (1) hypothesis formulation and theory construction; (2) the measurement of sociological variables; and (3) data collection techniques - experimental, survey, and observational. At the end of the course, students should appreciate both the strengths and the limitations of sociological research methods.

.We frequently encounter statements or claims based on statistics, such as: "Women earn less than men," "The American population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse," or "Married people are healthier than unmarried people." On what information are these statements based? What kinds of evidence support or refute such claims? How can we assess their accuracy? This course will show students how to answer these sorts of questions by interpreting and critically evaluating statistics commonly used in the analysis of social science data. Hands-on data analysis and interpretation are an important part of the course. You will gain the skills to conduct quantitative data analysis using a statistical software package. You should finish the course with the ability to interpret, question, and discuss statistics accurately and with an understanding of which type of statistic is appropriate for different kinds of data and research questions. No prior statistical knowledge is required. This course is ideal for students interested in the social and/or life sciences as well as business and/or law. Students are strongly encourage to take the optional course SOC 31903, "Tutorial for SOC Statistics"

This rigorous, hands-on, interdisciplinary seminar prepares students to design and execute an independent international field research project. The course enhances your ability to conduct your own research, but also teaches techniques that will be useful for the rest of your academic studies, and for understanding research results presented to you through popular press in your life after college. This class is unique because throughout, your learning and work are geared specifically to your selected research interests. The first part of the class guides students through the steps of refining a research project and preparing a research proposal. The second part of the class will help students hone their ability to conduct research through a series of research practicums: students get hands-on experience in a variety of methodological approaches through research conducted in the local area. Because of the over-arching nature of the course, we will touch on topics of research design, such as developing a research question, a theoretical framework, and hypothesis testing, as well as analysis of data and evidence. However, we encourage students to see this course as a complement, rather than a substitute, for discipline specific research methods and analysis courses.

Tutorial section accompanying Statistics for Social Research (SOC 30903). The tutorial will include statistical programming (for example, in Stata or R) and problem solving that applies statistical concepts covered in the main course lecture. While optional, this lab is very highly recommended to gain the skills necessary to implement material from the course.

Work on a real-world project that can impact Native American education in the present while learning the history that shaped the modern era. Native American Education is deeply intertwined with American history, education, and policy. The current American government is seriously investigating the past uses of education as a tool for assimilation (and worse) in Native American communities. In 2022 the Pope went to Canada and apologized for the role the Church played in the residential boarding schools, and the Subcommittee on Native American issues for the USCCB is investigating the same here in the United States. This course blends primary source historical work with active and engaging projects with Native communities to engage students in both history and historical thought to do consulting and problem-solving that will help shape real policy in the present day! This class promises to be like no other course you’ve had and get you working with others in truly collaborative manners very quickly in the semester. Not in ESS? Write me and see what accommodation we can make!

This course provides an introductory overview of the sociology major and the opportunities students have within the Sociology Department and the Arts and Letters College, as well as across the University. The course has a practical focus. Some classes are devoted to equipping students with knowledge and skills that will serve them as they progress through the major. Other classes focus on future plans, such as entering the work force, going on to graduate or professional school, and performing service after the baccalaureate. The idea of "career as vocation" is also explored. This course is for one credit, pass/fail, and is required of all sociology majors.

Discussions about curriculum and pedagogy in education have, for the most part, been limited and limiting, exploring curriculum as a written plan of study (often handed down by the state or a district) and pedagogy as the mere equivalence of teacher instruction. Using some foundational and contemporary theories in education combined with those with ideas from public pedagogy and cultural studies, the intent of this course is to broaden and complexify our understandings of curriculum and pedagogy - what they are, what they entail, where and by whom they are enacted, and, mostly, what they "do" in education when conceived in more broader terms. Using a variety of texts, both in and outside of education, we will explore how pedagogy and curriculum combine with the "public" to operate - to -educate - in "spaces"like a college campus, a theme park, a museum, a textbook, a classroom, a mall or grocery store, or through popular cultural texts such as film, advertising, social media, and/or newspapers. Going back and forth between discussions of curricular artifacts and pedagogical understandings in education proper and those public "texts" noted above, we will examine how curriculum and pedagogy operate in both formal and informal educational settings, what one may learn from the other, and, in the process, re-imagine what these terms could mean in the context of K-12 education.

This course offers an introduction to sociological theory. The course explores key issues in the philosophy of social science and the development and evaluation of social theory. It places emphasis on the connection between sociological theory and underlying philosophical commitments, on the central intellectual and conceptual problems in social theorizing, and on the major traditions or schools of sociological theory that have developed as responses to those problems. We will pay particular attention to classic sociological works of Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others, reading significant selections of their original works. Additionally, this course fulfill the Sociolgical Theory requirement for Sociology majors and minors.

The Sociology Internship is a community-based learning course designed to give students some practical experience in the area of urban affairs, social welfare, education, health care, or business, in order to test their interest, complement their academic work, or acquire work experience preparatory to future careers.  Students are placed in a community agency in the South Bend area and normally work seven hours per week as interns under the supervision of an experienced practitioner. Scheduling hours is a flexible process in order to accommodate the intern's availability and the needs of the host agency. While there are no prerequisites, preference is given to Sociology majors, ALPP or SCPP majors, PSIM minors, and students who have had course work in an area related to social concerns. This is a graded course. In addition to field work, academic work includes reading scholarly works related to the field placement, periodic group meetings with the instructor and others in the course, periodic short reports, and a final paper. Departmental approval is required.

Directed Readings in Sociology offers a student the chance to work closely with a member of the faculty on a topic that is not available through any of the regularly offered courses. This independent study course allows for the student, under the guidance of the faculty mentor, to draw up a reading list and study plan for in-depth reading throughout the semester. The student is responsible for periodic oral and/or written reports and at least one major paper. To qualify for this course, a student must have a GPA of at least 3.5 in Sociology. A formal application is required. Students should have a clear idea of the topic they want to pursue and the faculty member they have asked to direct them before requesting a copy of this form from the Director of Undergraduate Studies. This is a graded course, no exceptions. Department Approval Required. (Before department approval is given, the student must have the application signed by the faculty member, the DUS in Sociology, and an Assistant Dean in the A&L Undergraduate Studies office.)

In many of the recurring conflicts around the world, at issue are demands for justice. Whether these revolve around economic inequality, political repression, environmental devastation, civil and political rights, ethnic or religious exclusion, or discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality or disability status (to name just a few), social movements are often the carriers of these calls for justice. In this course, we will examine how social movements emerge from, contribute to, and suggest resolutions for various types of social conflict, as well as explore their potential contributions to sustainable peacebuilding. We will examine theory and research on how social movements emerge, escalate, consolidate and decline; how they choose (and change) protest tactics; how they articulate their visions and goals; how they generate emotions, solidarity and commitment; how they interact with networks of allies, opponents and powerholders; and how they influence (or fail to influence) agendas, policies, and regimes. We will put a particular emphasis on the comparative study of social movements in different regions of the world, as well as on the challenges and opportunities posed by transnational movements that seek to organize across borders.

Baseball is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, baseball has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from baseball's past been remembered and re-imagined? What is considered scandalous and why (and who decides)? How has success in baseball been defined and redefined? Centering baseball as an industry and a cultural practice, this course will cover topics that include the political, economic, and social development of professional baseball in the United States; the rise of organized baseball industry and Major League Baseball; and globalization in professional baseball. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts that include Rob Rucks's How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (2011), Adrian Burgos's Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (2007), Daniel Gilbert's Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency (2013), Robert Elias's How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (2010), and Michael Butterworth's Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror (2010). Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.

If, as John David Rhodes argues, “the detached single family home is one of the most powerful metonymic signifiers of American cultural life – of the dreams of privacy, enclosure, freedom, autonomy, independence, stability, and prosperity that animate national life in the United States,” that is not to say that then home in American cinema is by no means a simple or stable construct, but is, if anything, represented most often as troubled, precarious, invaded, porous, unstable, or out of reach. This class considers meanings of home in American cinema by looking at films that confront the problem of how to live in a home, offer alternate structures, and show the fantasy of home to be out of reach. The class will analyze films about unhoused figures during the Depression, housing shortages during World War II, the rise of modern homelessness in the 1980s, and contemporary precarity. We will consider fantasies of home related to family, class status, age, and race. We will consider the roles of banks, landlords, gentrification, and other institutions and structural causes of home insecurity and homelessness. Students will read various theories and histories of housing and homelessness to frame understanding of films. Students will write weekly one page reflections, an 8-10 page paper, and a 15 minute conference presentation.

The goal of the course is to compare the processes by which social scientists and filmmakers/photographers engage in social documentation. Students explore how global social problems such as rural and urban poverty, race and gender inequalities, immigration, and violence are analyzed across the social sciences, and depicted in a variety of documentary film and photography genres. The course also explores the role that documentary photography and film play in promoting rights and advocating for social change, particularly in the realm of human rights and global inequality. It examines the history of documentary film and photography in relationship to politics, and to the development of concerns across the social sciences with inequality and social justice. It also looks at how individual documentarians, non-profit organizations and social movements use film and photography to further their goals and causes, and issues of representation their choices raise. The course is also unique because it requires students to engage in the process of visual documentation themselves by incorporating an activity-based learning component. For their final project, students choose a human rights or social problem that concerns or interests them (and which they can document locally - no travel is required), prepare a documentary -exhibit- on the chosen topic (10-12 photographs), and write a 12-15 page paper analyzing how 2-3 social scientists construct and frame the given problem. Students also have the option to produce a short documentary film.

In a tumultuous and changing world, how do we imagine possible futures? How do we navigate amidst the uncertainties of our complex global arena to steer towards the futures we want, and away from those we don’t want? This class will explore the future-oriented imagination in the context of contemporary global challenges related to peace/conflict, democracy, human rights, climate change, and other pressing issues. We will do this by using the tools that professional “futurists” have used to make predictions about the future, as well as to provoke “out of the box” thinking about alternative future possibilities. These include techniques for forecasting, visioning, scenario planning, experiential play, and design thinking. We will also discuss religious and literary forms of future imagining, including apocalyptic, messianic, and redemptive narratives, along with fictional depictions in science fiction and speculative genres such as Afrofuturism. We will consider the relevance of utopian and dystopian narratives for understanding contemporary global problems and dilemmas. Finally, we will consider how social movement activists and community groups around the world have used futures thinking to transform unjust conditions and generate more humane ways of living and working together.

Given the substantial number of children nationwide who have current or formerly incarcerated parents, undocumented parents, or parents who have been investigated by the child welfare system, there is a clear need to understand how involvement with these surveilling systems influences involvement with the school system. This class will pair close analysis of empirical research and sociological theory with opportunities to engage in qualitative fieldwork within the local community in efforts to unravel the precise links among families, schools, and surveilling systems to better understand how secondary effects of involvement with these systems have implications for children's schooling and parental engagement. Students will learn sociological theories, practice qualitative data collection techniques, and have a range of opportunities to apply their knowledge and skills to an ongoing community-based research project.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this research method. We will read, listen to, and watch works to think through the various ways that Black intellectuals have used ethnography to make sense of our everyday social worlds.

Models of human communication developed in linguistic anthropology have long relied on empirical analysis and cross-cultural comparison of how people talk to other people, and to a variety of non-human “persons” as well. This course examines how anthropologists study communication between humans and non-humans, and how communication helps make persons out of non-humans. The class concerns research on seances and related scenes of spirit possession where the dead speak, talking with animals whether pets or prey, learning spiritual lessons from teacher plants, and contemporary conversations people have with artificial intelligence language models. We compare how anthropologists have asked questions about personhood when considering speech across species boundaries or across divides such as life and death. We ask how communication constructs interlocutors and makes relationships possible, and we consider the commonality and variety among communicative approaches and tactics. We ask if communication with non-humans connects people to other worlds of experience, or if it is more instructive as a projection of our own social life onto others.

What is the Palestine/Israel conflict about? How did it start? How might it be resolved? Some interpretations rely on claims of ancient hatreds. Others invoke sacred and biblical narratives as their authority for claims to a land deemed holy by many different religions. Still others underscore the ills and legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous accounts of historical presence. Some invoke international law and human rights to make their claims. This course will explore these arguments surrounding the Palestine/Israel conflict through screening and discussion of cinematic representation, narrative argument, and documentary films. Multiple genres provide powerful tools to introduce students to multiple perspectives, conceptions of history, experiences of injustice and grievances and loss, and imagining peace and justice. Each screening will be paired with relevant and interdisciplinary reading material. The students will emerge from this course with a detailed and complex understanding of the Palestine/Israel conflict from the present dating back to the late Ottoman period, the British control of historic Palestine, and the definitional moment of 1948 which is marked both as Israeli independence and the Palestinian catastrophe (the Nakba).

Millions of people around the world have been forced from their homes by interlinked factors including persecution, armed conflict, natural disasters, development projects and socio-economic deprivation. Resolving large-scale displacement represents a critical challenge for contemporary peacebuilding and development processes. This course is designed to introduce students to various theoretical and methodological frameworks that inform and shape forced migration laws, policies and practice. Specifically students will: (i) examine international, regional, national and local responses to the problem of forced migration; (ii) investigate the obstacles to effective protection and assistance for refugees and displaced persons; (iii) explore the challenge of resolving displacement crises, and (iv) discuss some of the moral dilemmas raised by forced migration.

This course provides you with tools needed to engage in research on social movements and collective action. An important component of the course involves becoming familiar with core theoretical insights in the field. However, we will also devote time and energy to developing your own research projects and developing additional research questions that could form the basis of future research projects. We begin by considering micro-level foundations of collective action. We will move on to study the emergence of social movement activism. Importantly, we also consider questions about how, and if, social movements matter in bringing about social change (e.g., either intentional or unintended consequences of activism).

Although advances in science and technology have made tremendous gains in promoting health and longevity, these achievements have not been experienced evenly. Instead, devastating health and disability-based inequities persist, such as environmental racism and disability-based discrimination. As a result, social movement groups and organizations are fighting to protect vulnerable communities and promote civil rights. This class will therefore address how social movements have impacted the health and human rights of vulnerable social groups in the US and beyond today. To do so, we will (1) use a sociological perspective to investigate the structural determinants of health and the social construction of disabilities, and (2) investigate how advocates, activists, and organizations fight for good health and disability justice. This course will require participation in a daylong multi-fieldsite visit, weekly readings, presentations, and a final paper.

What is the relationship between the Jewish tradition and Israeli politics? Why can't we talk about Jewish modernity without talking about Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the occupation of Palestine? What are the legacies of Jewish social justice activism and Jewish anti-racism in Israel and the diasporas? What are the intersectional experiences of Jews of Color, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and other non-European Jews and how do they challenge normative accounts of Jewish modernity and Jewish assimilation into "whiteness"? This course will examine Jewish modernity with a special focus on the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism in Euro-America and shifts from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power as they manifest in cases from Jewish anti-apartheid activism in South Africa and solidarity during the Civil Rights Movement in the US to the Israeli regime which has been defined by multiple Jewish and non-Jewish organizations such as Amnesty Internaitonal as "apartheid." The course will examine narratives of Jewish displacement, belonging, and de/coloniality and will centralize approaches and experiences of marginalized communities as a way to interrogate Jewish modernity and politics.

This course explores the theory and practice of community peacemaking. It covers the benefits, challenges and methods of local peacemaking, as well as the relationship between peacemaking and peacebuilding. Content will draw on practitioner experience in South Africa, South Bend and elsewhere. Guest lecturers will include community activists from South Bend.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a crucial skill in the workforce, especially with the advent and accessibility of generative AI technologies. From intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants to automated content creation and sentiment analysis, NLP applications are transforming industries and redefining how we interact with technology. Mastery of NLP techniques and tools not only opens doors to careers in the technology sector but also equips students to contribute to innovations that shape our future. Language Processing in Practice is a hands-on course designed to introduce students to the fundamental theory and applications of NLP, with a special emphasis on working with large language models, generative AI, and the Hugging Face ecosystem. The course focuses on practical techniques for processing, analyzing, generating, and understanding human language data. Students will explore key topics such as text preprocessing, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, machine translation, and text generation. The curriculum places a strong emphasis on modern NLP libraries and frameworks like NLTK, spaCy, and particularly Hugging Face Transformers. Through a series of projects and assignments, students will gain experience in building NLP applications, creating word embeddings with pre-trained large language models, and generating human-like text using generative AI models. Basic proficiency in Python programming is required.

This course offers an in-depth analysis of the roles of structural and cultural violence in peace studies. Unit 1 (conceptual/theoretical) explores field-formative debates over the nature, basis, and viability of "structural violence" and "cultural violence" as analytical concepts, asking how they have shaped (or failed to, but perhaps ought to shape) the field of peace studies. We will examine their critical appropriations of early critical theory, and assess comparable theoretical approaches such as reflexive sociology (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant), post-structural analysis (Michel Foucault), and later critical theory (Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth) while asking what advantages, if any, lenses of structural and cultural violence have vis-à-vis these resources for peace analysis and peacebuilding, and where they need to be supplemented. Unit 2 (cases/agents) studies cases in which some version of these analytical lenses have been deployed for purposes of peace analysis and peacebuilding. We examine recent uses of these lenses to examine poverty, global development, and global health in building peace (e.g. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, Peter Uvin), religious/cultural identity (Veena Das), and race, class, and gender (Joshua Price on incarceration and prison abolition in the U.S; Alex Mikulich and Laurie Cassidy on white complicity in hyper incarceration).

What does it mean to be Latino and who should be in/excluded from that category? Are Latin@s a “race’ or an “ethnicity” or an “ethnorace” or something else? Should we even be using “Latino”? Or should we use labels like Hispanic, Latino/a or Latin@? What about “Latinx” or “Latine”? And what do these different questions tell us about the lives of the more than 62 million people in the US who personally or whose parents and ancestors once lived in places as far-reaching as Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and perhaps even Brazil and the Philippines? This course aims to answer these questions by examining research, journalism, and media that elaborate on how race and ethnicity are constructed within US histories and systems of discrimination, prejudice, nativism, etc. Students will study empirical patterns and theoretical discussions on Latin@ immigration, panethnicity, political behavior and mobilizations, and interactions with US institutions. In exploring theory and patterns, this course will emphasize how racial-ethnic inequality shapes Latin@ life, both between Latinx@s and other groups (like Asian, Black, and white Americans) and amongst Latin@s. We will also explore how racial/ethnic inequality intersects with other social categories and systems, including gender and social class. Students will further explore the potential futures of Latin@ populations in the US.

We frequently encounter statements or claims based on statistics, such as: "Women earn less than men," "The American population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse," or "Married people are healthier than unmarried people." On what information are these statements based? What kinds of evidence support or refute such claims? How can we assess their accuracy? This course will show students how to answer these sorts of questions by interpreting and critically evaluating statistics commonly used in the analysis of social science data. Hands-on data analysis and interpretation are an important part of the course. You will gain the skills to conduct quantitative data analysis using a statistical software package. You should finish the course with the ability to interpret, question, and discuss statistics accurately and with an understanding of which type of statistic is appropriate for different kinds of data and research questions. No prior statistical knowledge is required. This course is ideal for students interested in the social and/or life sciences as well as business and/or law.

This course focuses on the literatures and practices relevant to the study of cultural transformation in the U.S. since 1990 and how it has affected young adult interest in American institutional religion. Participating students are actively involved in a grant-funded empirical research project studying the causes of cultural change in the U.S. and the ways those shaped the religious outlooks and interests of members of Gen X and Millennials. The course will focus both on learning methods of social research, theories of culture and cultural change, and the sociology of religion. Registration by permission of the instructor only.

Readings on Marx is a discussion based one credit course for students interested in reading some actual works by Marx as well as works by current Marxist scholars. Depending on student interests, topic may include religion, education, health care, crime, social movements, colonialism, or whatever topics interest students who are registered for the course. Students will be responsible for not only doing the readings, but also participating in weekly discussion, and at least once during the semester, leading the discussion. Space is limited and applications are required. Please click on the following link to apply: https://forms.gle/iXLQRtNttA2exAs47.

This is the lab/screening co-requisite for SOC 40126.

Work on a real-world project that can impact Native American education in the present while learning the history that shaped the modern era. Native American Education is deeply intertwined with American history, education, and policy. The current American government is seriously investigating the past uses of education as a tool for assimilation (and worse) in Native American communities. In 2022 the Pope went to Canada and apologized for the role the Church played in the residential boarding schools, and the Subcommittee on Native American issues for the USCCB is investigating the same here in the United States. This course blends primary source historical work with active and engaging projects with Native communities to engage students in both history and historical thought to do consulting and problem-solving that will help shape real policy in the present day! This class promises to be like no other course you've had and get you working with others in truly collaborative manners very quickly in the semester.

From the cultural content we consume, through apartment hunting, to dating, more and more aspects of people’s lives nowadays unfold on digital platforms. The vast quantities of data generated, together with the availability of data analysis tools and the computational resources that power them, provide social scientists with exciting opportunities to make sense of social phenomena that, previously, were often impossible to capture. This course introduces advanced undergraduates to modern methods sociologists and other social scientists use to collect and analyze data at scale, with an emphasis on the analysis of text and of spatial data. Together, we will discuss and think through recent research that applies these methods to gain insight into how social processes operate. We will gain hands-on experience with the open-source R programming language, powering much of this research. Through in-class activities, assignments, and an independent research project, we will develop skills in data collection, wrangling, and analysis using R, aiming to uncover hidden trends and answer social puzzles. Prior experience with R, specifically, is not necessary, although some statistics or programming background is required.

In this class we will examine cultural dimensions of important social processes, and we will survey contemporary sociological approaches to analyzing culture. Examples will include readings on home and work, social hierarchies, political culture, media and the arts, and social change.

n the years following its inception, utopian narratives of the Internet promised unfettered access to information, markets, and relationships that would allow users to create wealth and contest power structures by building platform-based enterprises and values-based virtual communities. While some of these benefits have accrued to individuals and society, a significant body of research demonstrates that the reality of the Internet's impact on the world is much more complex. Grounded in key sociological texts, this course focuses on empirical research concerning how "Digital Divides" - differences in individuals' access to, participation in, and benefits from using the Internet - exist on geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic dimensions. It also examines the important role skill and literacy play in mitigating these differences, and takes up the nascent understanding of algorithmic literacy, the increasingly critical knowledge set people need as they navigate the many facets of everyday life now powered by artificial intelligence. As part of the course, students will learn how to critically evaluate empirical social scientific publications and also compose their own literature review concerning a topic related to the course theme.

In this course we will examine how different kinds of organizations and institutions (corporations and firms, NGOs and non-profits, media organizations, economic development organizations, multilateral governance institutions, social movement organizations) work internationally and develop relationships with international partners and counterparts. We will focus on the relationships among organizations in developed and developing countries (their collaborations and conflicts), with particular attention to how they respond and adapt to cultural differences in a globalizing world. We will also examine how organizations move different kinds of innovations around the world, from products (toys and soap operas) and policies (health care and environmental policies, and anti-discrimination laws), to norms and ideas (human rights, peace building, and democracy).

This course aims to challenge our assumptions about which education as an institution in the United States is predicated and ask some fundamental questions about the relationship between education and society. Why does everyone go to school? Why do some students seem to learn more and “get ahead” than others? What factors shape how schools are run and organized, and what curricular materials are taught? How do schools help to maintain our capitalist system, and how do the factors of race, class, and gender affect the educational experiences of students within schools and classrooms? How can schools become more effective? What interventions have worked to improve schools? These are among the questions we will consider this semester. A primary focus of this course will be on the effects of schools and classrooms on educational outcomes. We will cover topics in the sociology of education related to school effects, sector effects, tracking and ability grouping, and classroom and teacher effects. We will look at the structure, practices, content, and outcomes of schooling, primarily in the light of their relationships to the wider society in which schools are situated. As part of the course, we will also consider the social and organizational context of contemporary education reforms in the United States—particularly test-based accountability for schools, teachers, and students—and place these reforms in a more global perspective.

This course examines the educational experiences and struggles of racial/ethnic minority students in US public schools. Students will study educational stratification by race/ethnicity, as well as how racial/ethnic minorities experience this stratification. We will explore legal, political, historical and social perspectives regarding educational policies and practices. Additionally, this course focuses on the potential of education as an agent for social justice and change for linguistically and culturally diverse groups.

Gender and sexuality are often taken for granted categories in social life and this is nowhere truer than in families, where the operation of gender and sexuality are usually invisible or appear as natural and private. Studying families offers a lens through which to explore and better understand gender and sexuality as complex social processes that structure our everyday lives. But families do not just reflect broader gender and sexual structures and inequalities - they also create and perpetuate them. As such, we will consider both how gender and sexuality affect our family aspirations and experiences, and how gender and sexuality get produced and reproduced within families. Some specific areas of family life we will explore include: dating, marriage, reproduction, parenting and child socialization, domestic labor, the negotiation of paid work and family care, and sexual desires and practices. We will draw on empirical studies about a variety of different kinds of families, including heterosexual, LGBTQ, and polygamous families. This is a discussion-based, seminar course that requires high levels of class participation.

Demography, the science of population, is concerned with virtually everything that influences, or can be influenced by, population size, distribution, processes, structure, or characteristics. This course pays particular attention to the causes and consequences of population change. Changes in fertility, mortality, migration, technology, lifestyle, and culture have dramatically affected the United States and the other nations of the world. These changes have implications for a number of areas: hunger, the spread of illness and disease, environmental degradation, health services, household formation, the labor force, marriage and divorce, care for the elderly, birth control, poverty, urbanization, business marketing strategies, and political power. An understanding of these is important as business, government, and individuals attempt to deal with the demands of the changing population.

This course addresses relations between theory and methods for scientific research on international migration with emphasis on immigration to the US; the objective is to prepare students to design research projects on this subject for theses and dissertations. The course will review basic questions on this subject and the methods through which these questions have been adequately or inadequately answered; the numbers, the impact, the nature, the structure, the process, the human experience, will be discussed in terms of the research methods commonly used to approach them.

This is the first part of a Catholicism and the Disciplines (CAD) seminar about immigration issues, especially those related to the México-U.S. border. For this part (two credits), we will meet in class to read and to discuss social scientific research about such topics as why migrants leave their home countries, what they encounter and experience when attempting to cross the border, the responses of U.S.-based citizen groups to unauthorized border crossings, and the effectiveness of current U.S. enforcement policies. We also normatively evaluate these responses and policies, particularly from a Catholic perspective (but also from other faith, non-religious perspectives). Lastly, we will process and reflect on our immersion trip to the Southern Arizona borderlands. (the co-requisite class, Mexico-U.S. Border Immersion Experience, requires separate registration and takes place over the semester?s mid-term break), including discussing what a uniquely Catholic border policy would look like, strategies to raise awareness about what is going in these borderlands, and migration issues and responses to them in other parts of the world. Enrollment in this seminar is competitive and is based on your responses to the Center for Social Concerns' application. Click here https://bit.ly/SemsApp to start the application process. You will be notified within a week or so after completing your application about your status.

Site of the delayed 2020 Olympics, Tokyo has recently been under scrutiny as a problematic international space. Tokyo's role as a complicated space of both exclusion and inclusion has a deeper history, however, extending back to a relatively recent founding in the late 16th century. This course looks at how the imaginative figuration of Tokyo has been a battleground for contesting different ethnic, social, and gendered identities in historical documents, literature, and popular culture.

What is the role of religious congregations in urban communities? Do communities with more congregations mobilize collectively at higher rates to address local issues or provide access to more social service programs? Are higher levels of social connectedness found in urban areas with a greater concentration of religious congregations? Essential to examining these and related questions is understanding the methodologies used to study religious congregations and their social consequences. Students will thus learn about and gain hands-on experience, for example, mapping via Geographic Information Systems (GIS), conducting survey research, and analyzing textual and visual data using computational methods. Students will apply such methodologies in the field during trips to Chicago and gain insight into community-based research through meetings with religious leaders to hear about their work. The course involves both in-class meetings (2-credits) and the co-requisite class “Religion and Urban America: The Windy City Experience Fieldwork” (1 credit) research trips to Chicago. Please click on this link (https://nd.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cuaV4VZ6VjZoJ7g) to fill out a survey about your availability for the latter. You can expect to hear back within a few days after you complete the survey about your approval for the course. Those granted approval will need to register for both the 2-credit and 1-credit parts of the course. Enrollment is determined on a rolling basis.

This course will examine the causes and consequences of international migration in a human rights perspective, ie, within the framework established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will investigate the experiences of populations who undergo displacement and resettlement across nation-states and the socio-political forces that criminalize populations seeking work and refuge across borders. Using readings and documentary films, students will become versed in contemporary current events within and outside of the United States, including the current crisis along the US-Mexico border. Course material will cover the social construction of borders, identities, and citizenship; differences in categories distinguishing migrants from one another; the factors fueling migration and the consequences of cross-border movement; the impact of emigrants' contexts of reception on their abilities to "make it"; racism, exploitation, and criminalization; and how non-citizens mobilize to contest discrimination. Grades will be based on attendance, active participation in class discussions, and writing assignments.

Why do some countries have higher levels of social, economic and political development than others? While focusing on the record of specific cases, this course focuses on a critical examination of the sociological theories that try to answer the various ramifications of this question.

Scholars and development practitioners increasingly agree that state effectiveness is a critical precursor for many other developmental efforts to improve human wellbeing, from health campaigns to mass education. Unfortunately, despite billions of dollars spent annually attempting reforms, many states around the world still struggle to administer effectively. This course will focus on understanding what affects state capacity, including the state's relationship with development. The course will focus on work on low- and lower-middle-income countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but unlike much work on the Global South that focuses on failures, we will disproportionately engage scholarship about what is working. Readings will include a combination of geography, scholarly periods (classic works, contemporary great pieces, and neglected insights that might be ripe for a come-back), and disciplines (political science, sociology, history and anthropology). Students will leave able to understand more precisely the central tasks of state administration, the foremost administrative challenges, and lessons from "pockets of effectiveness" around the world that have managed to provide relatively strong administration in the public interest, despite operating in environments where many peer organizations fail.

One would think that secrets are hard to keep, and lies hard to maintain, because it doesn't take much for the truth to escape, and once it's out, it can't be put back into the bottle. Yet secrets and lies reside at the heart of much social and political order, sometimes for years and even decades at a time. The objective of this course is to advance our scientific understanding of how this is possible, drawing on sociological, psychological, and historical research on such things as performance, secrecy, lying, forgetting, doubt, denial, and inattention. Case studies will include instances of corporate malfeasance (such as Ponzi schemes and insider trading), Big Tobacco's cover-up of the health consequences of smoking, Watergate, the secret British program to break the German cipher during WWII, elaborate attempts to cover up government atrocities, the cat-and-mouse game between international inspectors and regimes thought to be developing banned weapons, and the plague of misinformation surrounding recent elections. Throughout, we will be concerned with the distinct methodological challenges of studying things many people want to keep secret. Requirements will include midterm and final examinations, reading quizzes/reaction papers, participation, and a final research paper.

Throughout much of American history, individuals have organized and acted collectively to advance interests based on a common racial or ethnic identity. In some instances, groups have organized in an attempt to overcome discrimination and to stake a claim to rights and privileges enjoyed by majority group members. In other cases, members of the majority group have organized to restrict opportunities for the minority and to protect an advantaged position. We will consider the causes and consequences of both progressive and conservative social movements--such as the civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and the contemporary alt-right - giving particular attention to how theories of social movements help us to understand episodes of race-based collective action.

Sociologists who study social movements and activism typically address questions about how disadvantaged groups are able to organize and engage in sustained protest in hopes of bringing about progressive change. In recent years, however, we have witnessed the growth of many organizations that aim to prevent change with hopes of preserving benefits that they enjoy. To understand this form of organized resistance to change, we need to closely examine how power operates in society to understand conditions that give rise to activism that resists progressive change. We consider the extent to which theories designed to explain progressive activism fail to account for conservative activism. The ultimate goal for the course is to provide you with the tools needed to formulate your own research questions and to engage with the academic literature to theorize your questions in a way that could lead to publishable research.

Economic actions like working, buying, selling, saving, and giving are a fundamental part of everyday life, and all spheres of society, from family to religion to politics, are interrelated with economy. Sociologists examine how social relationships from small networks to transnational linkages affect economic actions and their outcomes, and the ways cultural meanings and political strategies shape those social relationships. The goal of this class is to provide students with new perspectives on economic actions by reading recent sociological studies of topics like money, markets, work, businesses, industries, and consumer society.

The purpose of this course is, in the setting of a small seminar, to engage students in close reading and broad discussion of sociological writings about religion by classical theorists of the discipline. Works that may be nominated for treatment include such mainstays as The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and other studies of religion by Emile Durkheim; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Sociology of Religion by Max Weber; portions of The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as excerpts from Marx's Capital; The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud; and various essays on religion by Georg Simmel. The course also will cover more recent works, both in the sociology of religion and in related fields, incorporating assumptions about and approaches to religion that can be traced to these pioneering authors.

This course investigates how religion influences what Americans think about politics and how they are involved in public life, including political participation and volunteering and community service. We will examine, for example, how and why religion influences positions on controversial social and political issues, such as abortion and immigration. And how the relation between religion and politics in American society has changed from the Christian Right and Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, evangelicals, and Christian Nationalism. At the organizational level, the course seeks to understand what religious congregations are doing for their communities and how they are active in political life, such as mobilizing protest, inviting political speakers, talking about politics, or organizing voter registration drives. The analysis will pay close attention to religious tradition differences, including investigating whether and why evangelical Protestants differ in involvement in civic and political life compared to Catholics, Black Protestants, mainline Protestants, or the nonreligious. By investigating the social roots of the relation of religion and politics, the course will shed light on the complex and shifting relationship between religion and public life in the United States.

"Society, Faith, and the Future of Nature " is an upper-level course that examines the relationship between contemporary society and the natural world from a sociological vantage. The readings and lectures are designed to be accessible to all. They introduce theory by means of concrete historical and cultural cases, so that history and theory illuminate one another. Students who have been exposed to sociology will find that it builds on the foundations they already have gained. Topics covered include population and demography, industrialization, capitalism as a system, consumer culture, social justice, the environmental movement, global environmental issues, the role of culture and religion when it comes to framing and mobilization, and civic responsibility. The main focus of the course is American society, but it also takes into account other societies and cultures. After taking this course, the students will have honed a range of powerful insights and tools for making sense of the environmental issues that we confront.

Emotions can bind us together and tear us apart. Emotions are central to answering questions like: Why do people do what they do? How do social situations endure? How to social situations change? In this course, we will study how social conditions shape our personal emotional experiences, group emotions, institutional emotions, and society-wide emotions. We will also look at how emotions in turn shape interactions, selves, group and institutional processes, cultural dynamics, and societal structures. By the end of the course, you will have insight into how emotions both shape and are shaped by, the social world.

Given the dramatic rise in mass incarceration over the last 50 years, understanding the spillover consequences of this uniquely American phenomenon has become increasingly important as a growing number of families now have direct experience with imprisonment. This course will provide a broad overview of the ripple effects of mass imprisonment on family life and how it shapes opportunity and structures disadvantage for communities, families, and especially children. This will be done through 1) exposure to mixed-media portrayals of imprisonment's effects on family and community life and 2) the close analysis of empirical research on the spillover and intergenerational consequences of incarceration across a range of outcomes. With the concentration of imprisonment falling among poor, minority families, much of the readings in this course will focus on family life in urban communities of color, however, we will spend a little time exploring broader accounts, including those of rural communities and encourage students to consider impacts for families exposed to incarceration due to white-collar crimes.

When people think about sexuality, they often adopt a biological view - seeing sexuality as "driven" by hormones and nature. This course adopts a different approach by viewing sexuality through the lens of sociology - as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, and ideologies. The course will focus on examining three sociological aspects of sexuality: 1) The social, historical, and cultural factors that shape sexual behaviors, desires, identities, and communities; 2) The ways in which sex and sexuality are constantly regulated and contested at multiple levels of society, including within families, schools, workplaces, and religious and political institutions; and 3) The sources, causes, and effects of sexual inequality. While our focus will be on sexuality, we will also study how other identities (including gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence and affect it. Students will be encouraged to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about sex and sexualities and to formulate critical perspectives on issues pertaining to sexuality in today's public discourses. This course is sex-positive in that it assumes that knowledge about sexuality is empowering, not dangerous. The readings and discussions will be frank, and students will be assisted in developing a language for and comfort level with discussing a wide range of sexual topics in a respectful and sociological way. In the process, students will be challenged to improve their critical thinking, researching, writing, and public speaking skills.

Through readings and discussion in this senior seminar, you will develop a better understanding of causes and consequences of race and class inequalities by looking at how racism and capitalism have shaped American history and society. We will explore how both capitalism and racism have evolved and how sociologists have understood the relationship between capitalism (and resulting class inequalities) and racism (and resulting racial inequalities). Among the historical periods we will look at our Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement era, and the current Black Lives Matter and abolitionist movement. Important topics that we will discuss are slavery, exploitation, discrimination, reparations, the carceral state, white privilege, racial resentment, public goods, immigration, genocide and settler colonialism. We will be reading excerpts from the following books: Abrajano, Marisa A., and Zoltan L. Hajnal. 2017. White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics. Alexander, Michelle. 2020. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Kaba, Mariame. 2021. We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket Books. . Kendi, Ibram X. 2019. How to Be an Antiracist. Klein, Naomi. 2015. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. McGhee, Heather. 2021. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Ruffin, Amber, and Lacey Lamar. 2021. You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism.

America is the richest country in the world and yet roughly three million American children now grow up in families surviving on just $2 a day. As America's richest 0.1% have seen their incomes more than quadruple over the last forty years, the incomes for 90% of Americans have barely changed. These financial disparities reflect deeper inequities in educational opportunity, incarceration rates, social status and more. In this course, we will examine the nature and consequences of American inequality. Through close reading and spirited discussion, we will address such questions as: What is the meaning of meritocracy in an age of profound inequality? What is the lived experience of American poverty and American privilege? How are race and gender inequalities (re)produced throughout the life course? And, finally, how do all of these issues manifest in the successes and struggles of students at Notre Dame?

Much of the violence in contemporary society - whether it is domestic abuse, school shootings, gang warfare, video games, or inter-ethnic conflict - has something to do with gender. This course explores the connection between gender role socialization and the expression of conflict or aggression. Through readings, discussions, films and projects, students will be encouraged to examine sex differences in violent behavior as the outcome of complex processes. We will try to understand those processes better and develop the ability to describe the causes and their effects.

Though sociologists are not fortune tellers, life course sociology has documented the human life course enough to reliably understand how and why people's lives are patterned in certain ways. This course seeks to understand how and why people change or remain the same throughout their lives. We will explore how lives are shaped by specific historical contexts, how individuals actively construct their life course within historical and social constraints, how our lives are intertwined (and how this shapes human action), and how the impact of life transitions on life trajectories is contingent on the timing of a particular change in a person's life. We will investigate patterns common in the different stages of our life course as well life course pathways related to family relationships, education, health and religion. Including all of these elements of life course sociology gives a fuller understanding of how individual lives are lived within our communities as well as global contexts, and also how lives are rooted in intersections of gender, class, race, sexual orientation and other statuses.

This workshop will complete 2 years of student sociological research on the Lilly Endowment-funded project on cultural change and religious secularization in the U.S., following up on the Pizzo Rome Scholars Program led by Professor Smith. Students will finalize data analysis and interpretation and read and discuss the scholarly publication drafts from the project.

Social networks are an increasingly important form of social organization. Social networks help to link persons with friends, families, co-workers and formal organizations. Via social networks information flows, support is given and received, trust is built, resources are exchanged, and interpersonal influence is exerted. Rather than being static, social networks are dynamic entities. They change as people form and dissolve social ties to others during the life course. Social networks have always been an important part of social life: in our kinship relations, our friendships, at work, in business, in our communities and voluntary associations, in politics, in schools, and in markets. Our awareness of and ability to study social networks has increased dramatically with the advent of social media and new communication tools through which people interact with others. Through email, texting, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, people connect and communicate with others and leave behind traces of those interactions. This provides a rich source of data that we can use to better understand our connections to each other; how these connections vary across persons and change over time; and the impact that they have on our behaviors, attitudes, and tastes. This course will introduce students to (1) important substantive issues about, and empirical research on, social networks; (2) theories about network evolution and network effects on behavior; and (3) tools and methods that students can use to look at and analyze social networks. The course will be a combination of lectures, discussions and labs. Course readings will include substantive research studies, theoretical writings, and methodological texts. Through this course students will learn about social networks by collecting data on social networks and analyzing that data.

Undergraduate Research Abroad in Sociology offers students a chance to engage in hands-on research, either by working on a faculty member's research project or by pursuing one's own research question unrelated to a senior thesis project. By the end of this course, students should demonstrate a deepened sense of empiricism and methodological understanding.

This course focuses on the literatures and practices relevant to the study of cultural transformation in the U.S. since 1990 and how it has affected young adult interest in American institutional religion. Participating students are actively involved in a grant-funded empirical research project studying the causes of cultural change in the U.S. and the ways those shaped the religious outlooks and interests of members of Gen X and Millennials. The course will focus both on learning methods of social research, theories of culture and cultural change, and the sociology of religion. Registration by permission of the instructor only.

The Sociology Internship[ is a community-based learning course designed to give students some practical experience in the area of urban affairs, social welfare, education, health care, or business, in order to test their interest, complement their academic work, or acquire work experience preparatory to future careers. Students are placed in a community agency in the South Bend area and normally work seven hours per week as interns under the supervision of an experienced practitioner. Scheduling hours is a flexible process in order to accommodate the intern's availability and the needs of the host agency. While there are no prerequisites, preference is given to Sociology majors, ALPP or SCPP majors, PSIM minors, and students who have had course work in an area related to social concerns. This is a graded course. In addition to field work, academic work includes reading scholarly works related to the field placement, periodic group meetings with the instructor and others in the course, periodic short reports, and a final paper. Departmental approval is required. The following is a list of agencies that have accepted interns. Students may also request placement in an agency they find on their own (subject to approval by the instructor). La Casa de Amistad Salvation Army of St. Joseph County (Social Services) Sex Offense Services of St. Joseph County (must complete paper work and training a semester in advance) Early Childhood Development Center Good Shepherd Montessori School Robinson Community Learning Center Upward Bound College Preparatory Program, UND AIDS Assist Center for Hospice & Palliative Care, St. Joseph County (usually requires two-semester commitment) Sr. Maura Brannick Health Center at Chapin Street The CASIE Center (Child Abuse Services, Investigation & Education) Family Justice Center Indiana Legal Services

This is the first part of a Catholicism and the Disciplines (CAD) seminar about immigration issues—especially those related to the México-U.S. border. For this part (two credits), we will meet in class to read and to discuss social scientific research about such topics as why migrants leave their home countries, what they encounter and experience when attempting to cross the border, the responses of U.S.-based citizen groups to unauthorized border crossings, and the effectiveness of current U.S. enforcement policies. We also normatively evaluate these responses and policies, particularly from a Catholic perspective (but also from other faith, non-religious perspectives). Lastly, we will process and reflect on our immersion trip to the Southern Arizona borderlands. (the co-requisite class, Mexico-U.S. Border Immersion Experience, requires separate registration and takes place over the semester's mid-term break), including discussing what a uniquely Catholic border policy would look like, strategies to raise awareness about what is going in these borderlands, and migration issues and responses to them in other parts of the world. Immersion Description: This is the second (experiential-learning) part of a Catholicism and the Disciplines (CAD) seminar about immigration issues—especially those related to the México-U.S. border. Like the first corequisite part (Mexico-US Border Seminar), students will receive two credits for successfully completing it. Over the semester's mid-term break, we will travel to the Southern Arizona borderlands for a weeklong immersion trip. Among the activities in which we will engage on the trip are: (1) observing Operation Streamline legal proceedings; (2) attending a humanitarian aid training; (3) touring a Border Patrol facility; (4) going to the border wall and learning about its environmental impact; (5) hearing from Catholic and leaders of other faith traditions about their social justice work along the border; (6) visiting Arivaca and Nogales to experience everyday life in a border community; and (7) participating in a Samaritans' humanitarian desert trip. Students will be notified about their acceptance status via email after submitting the application. There are fees associated with this seminar. This is a graded course.

What is the role of religious congregations in urban communities? Do communities with more congregations mobilize collectively at higher rates to address local issues or provide access to more social service programs? Are higher levels of social connectedness found in urban areas with a greater concentration of religious congregations? Essential to examining these and related questions is understanding the methodologies used to study religious congregations and their social consequences. Students will thus learn about and gain hands-on experience, for example, mapping via Geographic Information Systems (GIS), conducting survey research, and analyzing textual and visual data using computational methods. Students will apply such methodologies in the field during trips to Chicago and gain insight into community-based research through meetings with religious leaders to hear about their work. The course involves both research trips to Chicago (1 credit) and a (2 credit) co-requisite class “Religion and Urban America: The Windy City Experience.” Please click on this link (https://nd.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cuaV4VZ6VjZoJ7g) to fill out a survey about your availability for the former. You can expect to hear back within a few days after you complete the survey about your approval for the course. Those granted approval will need to register for both the 2-credit and 1-credit parts of the course. Enrollment is determined on a rolling basis.

Directed Readings in Sociology offers a student the chance to work closely with a member of the faculty on a topic that is not available through any of the regularly offered courses. This independent study course allows for the student, under the guidance of the faculty mentor, to draw up a reading list and study plan for in-depth reading throughout the semester. The student is responsible for periodic oral and/or written reports and at least one major paper. To qualify for this course, a student must have a GPA of at least 3.5 in Sociology. A formal application is required. Students should have a clear idea of the topic they want to pursue and the faculty member they have asked to direct them before requesting a copy of this form from the Director of Undergraduate Studies. This is a graded course, no exceptions. Department Approval Required. (Before department approval is given, the student must have the application signed by the faculty member, the DUS in Sociology, and an Assistant Dean in the A&L Undergraduate Studies office.)

Directed Research in Sociology offers students a chance to engage in hands-on research, either by working on a faculty member's research project or by pursuing one's own research question unrelated to a senior thesis project. By the end of this course, students should demonstrate a deepened sense of empiricism and methodological understanding. This is a graded course, and a formal application is required. (See the DUS for a copy.) Students engaged in a faculty member's research project should work out a study plan and evaluation process for assigning a final grade with the faculty member. Students engaged in their own research project should (1) submit their research questions, hypotheses, data source, and methodology to their faculty director at the time of application to the course, and (2) submit a written research report by the end of the semester, as part of the final evaluation process. Department Approval Required.

The Sociology Senior Thesis is a two-semester course where students are required to complete an original research project under the direction of a faculty advisor. Additionally, the Senior Thesis is a clearly and precisely written polished document, therefore writing is central to the process. Students are required to meet with the Director of Undergraduate Studies before registering for the class. The Thesis fulfills two of the required 40000 level classes and is required for all students on the Honors Track

In this seminar, students will learn major theories and methods in the sociology of religion and apply them to a research project of their choosing. Possible research projects include those focused on understanding sociologically how religious beliefs or behaviors affect civic engagement, physical or mental health, educational attainment, or occupational choice. Because the end goal of the seminar is a publishable paper in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, students need to come to the first class with plans for what data they will analyze (there will not be time for extensive data collection during the semester), excluding IRB approval (that can be done early in the semester). Students will receive funding to help advance their research projects, such as the purchase of computer software or transcription of interviews. Admission to this seminar is highly competitive and will generally be limited to 5-7 students. The seminar particularly seeks applications on some aspect of global religion, though this is not required. All applications will be equally considered. Students need not be a sociology major or minor to apply. Applications are due no later than two weeks after the opening of the semester registration of classes. Decisions will be made within a week of the application deadline. To apply, go to . https://nd.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0kRegZEzxF7RTeZ Students who took Soc48666 cannot take this course.

This seminar will analyze pre-collected survey and big data (e.g., Twitter) on topics in the sociology of religion as they relate to social justice (e.g., Black Lives Matter or humanitarian aid to undocumented migrants along the Mexico-U.S. border) to write research papers, with the goal being to submit the final version to academic conferences and/or scholarly peer-reviewed journals. In addition to instruction in data management and analysis, we will spend time dissecting the major parts of a sociological research article, including the theoretical framework and methodological approach. Students will tailor these parts to their specific research projects, and will turn in drafts and present on them several times during the semester to receive constructive feedback.