| SOCI 110-01 |
Social Analysis
Instructor: Yalcin Ozkan
Course Description:
Selected topics in the empirical study of the ways in which people's character and life choices are affected by variations in the organization of their society and of the activities by which social arrangements varying in their adequacy to human needs are perpetuated or changed.
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09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 311 |
| SOCI 230-01 |
Sociology of Money
Instructor: Yalcin Ozkan
Course Description:
Is money a self-propelling medium of exchange, solely about mundane financial calculations, transactions, and interests? Do we only use it to quantify various qualities into a standard metric to exchange them? What happens when money penetrates what is typically considered priceless, such as our norms, emotions, intimate relations, bodies, or nature? In today's world, it is common for various economic, legal, and social institutions to place financial values on things as profound as human life, death, blood, organs, justice, sexual or romantic partnerships, and wildlife. Does this exercise flatten, commodify, corrode, and corrupt, as many scholars, legalists, activists think it does? Or, does it operate interdependently with our moral principles, cultural practices, interpersonal relationships? Then, how can those supposed corrosive commodification practices, in reality, turn into meaningful relations within which our lives, values, and ties are construed, maintained, and shaped? This conference invites its participants to grapple with these fundamental problems and more. Drawing on neoclassical economic theory to its Marxist critics, critical socio-legal scholarship to moral philosophy, cultural studies to economic sociology, we'll delve deep into the social life of money. Thus, we'll examine money not merely as a financial instrument but with the social and cultural processes mediating its significance from within.
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12:30 PM-01:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 112 |
| SOCI 230-02 |
Health & The Criminal Legal System
Instructor: Chloe Craig
Course Description:
Cross-listed with HEST 250-01 and LAWP 290-03. In this class, students will learn how the criminal legal system impacts health. We will first unpack distal and proximate determinants of health and Fundamental Causes theory. We will then analyze health outcomes as they relate to three parts of the criminal legal system: neighborhood surveillance and policing, incarceration, and reentry. We will read works on intersectionality and talk about differences in health outcomes by race, class, and gender. We will spend several weeks on reproductive health and incarceration. Students will be required to engage in weekly discussions based on readings and produce a final research paper on health and the criminal legal system on a topic that interests them. By the end of the class, students should have a deep understanding of how institutions can influence health at the individual level and should be able to demonstrate the relationship between health and the criminal legal system.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 104 |
| SOCI 230-03 |
Housing, Health and Inequality in Dallas
Instructor: Laura Megivern
Course Description:
Permission of Instructor Required. Part of the Dallas Globally Integrated Program. This Globally Integrated course focuses on housing, health, and inequality and their interconnections - particularly in our host community of Dallas. We will explore the questions of what it means to be healthy - for individuals and communities - using the concepts of social and political determinants of health. We will focus on housing and its related issues, as well as the ways policy decisions can impact communities, using our example of Dallas. Students will complete a community data brief on a U.S. location of their choice - allowing us to consider the question: what is the story of a community, and who gets to tell it? We will hear from community organizers, service providers, neighbors, and others both in Dallas and in Carlisle. This course integrates a service-learning immersion with two partner organizations in Dallas from March 7 -15, 2026. We will leave campus in the morning on Saturday, March 7 and return to campus in the late afternoon or evening of Sunday, March 15.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 112 |
| SOCI 234-01 |
Middle Eastern American Communities
Instructor: Erik Love
Course Description:
Cross-listed with MEST 234-01. This interdisciplinary course considers the history of Middle Eastern American communities, and the related development of "Islamophobia." We survey the history of the diverse immigrant communities that trace their heritage to a vast region of the world, the variously defined "Middle East." In the 1990s, Islamophobia emerged as a controversial concept after decades of discussion around Orientalism and anti-Arab racism. Today, some see Islamophobia as a catch-all concept for discrediting necessary anti-terrorism measures like profiling, surveillance, and wiretaps. Others see Islamophobia as fitting into a pattern of racialized scapegoating, where people experience violence and discrimination. Topics for discussion include ethnic group and identity formation, the "war on terror," connections between domestic and international US policy, and civil rights advocacy. This course is cross-listed as MEST 234. Offered every two years.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
DENNY 203 |
| SOCI 236-01 |
Inequalities in the U.S.
Instructor: Chloe Craig
Course Description:
This course takes a critical look at the layers of American society that shape, construct, and inhibit the basic pursuit for equality of opportunity. Students will be asked to examine how the three most fundamental elements of social stratification (race, class, gender) function both separately and in tandem to organize systems of inequality. The course uses theoretical and practical applications of stratification to evaluate how social constructions of difference influence the institutions and social policy. Additionally, class discussions will also consider how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism impact the attainment of basic needs, such as wages, health care and housing. Offered every year.
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11:30 AM-12:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 110 |
| SOCI 240-01 |
Qualitative Methods
Instructor: Helene Lee
Course Description:
This course introduces students to the theory and methods of social science research, beginning with an examination of the philosophies underlying various research methodologies. The course then focuses on ethnographic field methods, introducing students to the techniques of participant observation, structured and informal interviewing, oral histories, sociometrics, and content analysis. Students will design their own field projects. Prerequisite: 110.
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03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
DENNY 112 |
| SOCI 270-01 |
Social Movements, Protest and Conflict
Instructor: Erik Love
Course Description:
The study of protest politics and social movements is the study of collective agency. Social movements arise when people act together to promote or resist social change. Movements represent not only grievances on a particular set of issues, but also frustration with more established political forms of making claims in societies. In this course, we will engage with some of the large theoretical debates in the study of social movements, reading both empirical treatments of particular movements and theoretical treatments of key issues. The featured case studies will include civil rights, feminism, ecology, the antinuclear movement, the New Right and the alternative globalization movement. We will be particularly concerned with the social and political context of protest, focusing on basic questions, such as: under what circumstances do social movements emerge? How do dissidents choose political tactics and strategies? And how do movements affect social and political change?
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09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
DENNY 110 |
| SOCI 313-01 |
Judith Butler
Instructor: Dan Schubert
Course Description:
Cross-listed with PHIL 261-04 and WGSS 302-02. The work of Judith Butler on gender, sexuality, performativity, precarity, ability, grievability, and the self has been influential across the social sciences and humanities for the last 40 years. In this WID course, we seek to follow the development of these ideas in their work, and to think about the ways in which they can inform our understandings of both academic issues and contemporary social reality. The multidisciplinary impact of Butler's work is reflected in the multidisciplinary composition of the student body in this course, and it is my hope that we will learn not only from Butler, but from one another and our different disciplinary ways of knowing.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 304 |
| SOCI 313-02 |
Structural Racism in American Transportation
Instructor: Erik Love
Course Description:
Transportation systems-bridges, highways, busses, railways, and more-have developed in the United States in ways that reflect social, cultural, and political histories. The stated goals for improvements or reforms to these systems have aligned with national priorities: enhancing the United States's economic and national standing by enabling safe and efficient transportation of people, goods, and services. These systems have contributed to structural inequalities by systematically excluding certain groups while advancing the interests of other groups. Transportation infrastructure, in short, has been built in ways that reflect the often racist priorities of American elites. This course explores case studies illustrating this pattern. Because improving equality in access to transportation has been a central concern of civil rights advocates for decades, organizations that work on transportation issues are active in nearly every city in the United States. By looking directly at ongoing advocacy strategies and tactics, students learn about interventions in local, regional, and state-level policymaking.
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10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
DENNY 204 |
| SOCI 313-03 |
Power and Resistance
Instructor: Yalcin Ozkan
Course Description:
This course invites its contributors to treat politics as grounded in everyday life, formed by social structures and agency, and as a medium of domination and change. It introduces key conceptual debates over power relations and forms of resistance while surveying the applications of these theories to various empirical topics, from the everyday politics of surveillance in the American welfare bureaucracy to the use of human rights as a tool of activism among queer Burmese. Individuals generate their thinking and acting not as they please but under the restrictions of those broader structural contexts and power imbalances. These social forces, however, do not divest individuals from becoming active agents. People almost always possess the capacity to resist and change. Understanding when, why, and how they realize that potential is a central concern of this class. It also asserts that exploring why people are resigned to and how they participate in their own domination is equally crucial. Thus, this course calls as much attention to those individual and collective forms of resistance as it does to their absence.
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10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 112 |
| SOCI 331-01 |
Contemporary Sociological Theory
Instructor: Dan Schubert
Course Description:
This course will examine alternative ways of understanding the human being, society, and culture as they have been presented in contemporary sociological theory (1925-present). It will focus on the theoretical logic of accounting for simple and complex forms of social life, interactions between social processes and individual and group identities, major and minor changes in society and culture, and the linkages between intimate and large-scale human experience. Prerequisite: 110 and one additional course in sociology, or permission of instructor. Offered every spring.
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03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
DENNY 304 |
| SOCI 405-01 |
Senior Thesis
Instructor: Helene Lee
Course Description:
Permission of Instructor Required
Independent study, in consultation with a specially constituted faculty committee, of a problem area chosen by the student. The student should, in addition to pursuing his/her own interests, also seek to demonstrate how various perspectives within sociology and, where relevant, other disciplines bear on the topic chosen. Permission of the instructor required.
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01:30 PM-04:30 PM, W
DENNY 315 |