2026-2027 Academic Year

Fall 2026

SOCI 330 Classical Sociological Theory
This course will examine alternative ways of understanding the human being, society, and culture as they have been presented in classical sociological theory (through 1925). 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 fall.

SOCI 400 Culture and Inequality
How do cultural processes (i.e., socially ingrained meanings and meaningful interpersonal relations) draw on and reinforce social inequality? In return, when, how, and with what consequences do subordinate groups form subversive cultures in the struggle for community, dignity, and equity? This seminar draws on cultural sociology to think about and study these broader questions that treat inequality beyond a simple material matter as a cultural and moral problem. We start with theoretical texts, establishing key concepts from habitus and cultural capital to symbolic boundaries. We then focus on case studies that tackle four sets of issues: education and the reproduction of privilege; urban space and class boundaries; economic and racial divides in intimacy; the making of inequality in production and consumption. Throughout these studies, we pay attention to the cultural processes within which class, gender, and race inequalities are rendered invisible and thus socially normalized without dismissing the processes of contestation through which communities use interpersonal relationships and cultural frames to envision and defend equity and inclusion. Through surveying theoretical and empirical studies of culture and inequality, this seminar also equips its contributors with the skills needed to craft a novel research proposal.

Spring 2027

SOCI 230 Law and Society
Cross-listed with LWJS 290-01. This course is designed as an introduction to law and society scholarship. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates over law in everyday life, law and social inequality, and the politics of law, we will focus on the law's social, cultural, and political dimensions. Most notably, this course is organized around three major themes. The first topic concerns the theories and methods scholars deploy to account for the affinities between law and social life. We will consider how legal pronouncements and institutions shape and are shaped by our social norms, values, and relationships through the concepts of, among others, "legality," "legal consciousness," and "legal pluralism." The second part deals with the gap between the law on the books and the law in action. We will discuss when and how the law reinforces class, gender, and race-based inequalities despite its ever-present promise of justice. The final section examines the law as constitutive of the status quo and social change by calling attention to politics within and through the law. Thus, we will put as much emphasis on the law's ideological underpinnings as on how people resort to the law to envision and demand systemic change.

SOCI 230 Sociology of Money
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.

LWJS 290 Law and Society
Cross-listed with SOCI 230-01. This course is designed as an introduction to law and society scholarship. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates over law in everyday life, law and social inequality, and the politics of law, we will focus on the law's social, cultural, and political dimensions. Most notably, this course is organized around three major themes. The first topic concerns the theories and methods scholars deploy to account for the affinities between law and social life. We will consider how legal pronouncements and institutions shape and are shaped by our social norms, values, and relationships through the concepts of, among others, "legality," "legal consciousness," and "legal pluralism." The second part deals with the gap between the law on the books and the law in action. We will discuss when and how the law reinforces class, gender, and race-based inequalities despite its ever-present promise of justice. The final section examines the law as constitutive of the status quo and social change by calling attention to politics within and through the law. Thus, we will put as much emphasis on the law's ideological underpinnings as on how people resort to the law to envision and demand systemic change.

SOCI 405 Senior Thesis
Permission of Instructor Required.