2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

SOCI 230 Law and Society
Cross-listed with LAWP 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.

LAWP 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 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.

Spring 2026

SOCI 110 Social Analysis
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.

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.

SOCI 313 Power and Resistance
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.