The Sociology of Cultural Invention
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
In this course we will explore both the social fantasy and reality of marriage and family. We will start by reading the stories of three women who made their way to the United States from Japan, Brazil and India by accepting proposals of marriage in, respectively, the early nineteenth century, the 1950s and early in 2000. Their stories will help us understand the sociology of marriage and family in both a global, as well as historical context, as well as help us start to interrogate the social meaning of platonic friendship, courtship, love, hate, bloodlines, ancestry and familial names. We will then shift our gaze to the United States and study the socio-history of marriage, adoption and divorce laws and governmental policies since the early 1900s to the present exploring specifically the civil torte of adultery; three famous radio and TV families (including Ozzie and Harriet, The Brady Bunch and The Gosselins); how specific advances in science and medicine have dramatically changed the ways people fall in love, as well as enter into legal sexual and familial partnerships; and finally, three notorious love stories, which didn't result in marriage or family. • See also Home Economics >>
Names We Call America, Digging the Roots of Cool
This course focuses on three very different communities, set in three very different places and times: African Americans living in the rural South during the first half of the twentieth century; bohemian Americans living in New York City and San Francisco in the post war, cold war era; and then finally, present day teenagers living in the American middle-west. This will allow us to explore and interrogate a very distinct kind and brand of American culture, American cool. Over the past 100 years, American cool has been a philosophy and a survival strategy, a kind of music, an identity, an artistic movement, a commodity, a marketing campaign and finally, a popular colloquialism. Arguably the literal and figurative foundation of modern American culture, to study the story of American cool is to study the African slave trade and African Americans struggle for individual and collective civil rights; blues, gospel, jazz and rock music; the work and popular image of American artists like Elvis, Jack Kerouac, James Dean and Jackson Pollack; as well as the aesthetic and rhetoric of American fashion, art and advertising. Readings for this course include but are not limited to Major Jackson's Hoops, Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, Amiri Baraka's Blues People, J.D. Salinger's Catcher In the Rye, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Lewis MacAdams' Birth of the Cool and Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool.
Stories That Could Be True, The Sociology of Truth & Fiction
In this course, students explore two key questions: First, how life is lived like a story and then second, how sociologists document these stories in sounds and images. Students are required to learn how to think sociologically, that is, they are required to think in an objective, unbiased way about other people's lives, especially the lives of those different from themselves. In addition, they are also required to try and figure out what distinguishes sociological stories from other kinds of true-life stories, namely stories told by novelists, audio documentary makers, anthropologists, photo journalists, documentary filmmakers, tabloid journalists and the producers of reality TV shows. The lives they study are specifically: North Americans living in the borderlands of places; a working-class American family living in San Francisco's Chinatown; two Amish American teenagers; a man intent on achieving the American dream; a very rich woman and a very poor man; and a man who is in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Emphasis is placed upon the ways these people are both officially and unofficially recognized as citizens of the United States, as well as members of five distinct regional communities, namely, Potsdam, New York; Queen's, New York; Amish Country, Indiana; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; New York City's Upper West Side and Angola Prison, Louisiana. The authors of these true-life stories will include but not be limited to one sociologist, Charles Lemert, as well as a photographer, Dorthea Lange, a documentary filmmaker, Chris Smith and me, a sociologist turned written/audio documentary maker.
Courses currently being revised or are in development
Ashes, The Sociology of Death & Mourning
Making Yourself Up, Autobiography, Memoir & The Sociology of Self
Tribal Rites/Rights, The Sociology of Culture