Academic Courses & Programs

Introductory Sociologies

It's Not Rocket Science, An Introduction To American Sociology
Sociology is the first academic discipline in the world to include real live people in its research. First created during the turn of the century in Europe and the United States by theologians, philosophers, historians, missionaries, journalists, social workers, it distinguishes itself from police work and social/political activism, other forms of social scientific inquiry, (such as anthropology or political science), as well as tabloid, literary and popular representations of reality through the use of specific research methods, namely analytic reasoning, ethnography, survey research, experiments and ethnomethodology. In this introductory course, students learn about the rhetorical power of these methods and how they can very effectively show us how to both look and listen for things like local and global cultures and communities, how children and adults are socialized and disciplined, how different social norms and niceties become institutionalized and, finally, different American global forms of systematic oppression, inequality and injustice.  • More >>

Practical/ity Matters
This is a course about all of the sociological work that happens, (and, sometimes, becomes published), outside of the academy. That is, all the work people do in industrialized places to care for and protect their fellow citizens, which is more practical than scientific, more hands on than theoretical. The course starts in the United Kingdom, in the late nineteenth century with the work of Florence Nightingale, a heroic field nurse who also did pioneering work in modern social statistics and demography, two disciplines which became important methods and subfields of academic sociology and other social scientific disciplines. It then shifts to the United States and the early part of the twentieth century and the South Side of Chicago where police officers, detectives and young graduate students at the University of Chicago collaborated to create elaborate ethnographic maps of the city to try and understand the culture of its subterranean and criminal communities. There were also newspaper reporters and social workers working in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago in those days and their work is also explored here as a way to lay the foundation for the courses final areas of inquiry: First, the rise of first person newspaper reporting (i.e., what is often called New Journalism) in the postwar and civil rights era. And, finally, the life and times of the most globally known social worker of the twentieth century, Mother Teresa. Throughout the duration of the course emphasis will be placed upon the kinds of sociological thinking these practical sociologists came to use, as well as the kinds of methods they used to document people's lives. Students will also try their hand at actually using these methods themselves.

Courses currently being revised or are in development
   Modern Social Problems