The Sociology of Place & Ancestry
Place Maps, The Sociology of Home
In this course we will examine how people are drawn together into a community and how they are kept separated in communities a part. In the first five weeks we will consider what community means in the contemporary moment by examining the ways people form groups, organizations and societies in the American Midwest and urban Afghanistan. The purpose of this investigation will be to articulate what American ideals of community might be and how they are used. Subject matter will include the social consequences for girls who live as/pretend to be boys; how work is socially constructed in the United States, Mexico and Canada; and two important moments in American legal history, the Salem Witch Trials and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. In the second five weeks, having established a working definition of American community, we will then consider how some specific communities in the North America are organized, policed and transformed using the analytic tools established by sociologists, geographers and social theorists. Subject matter will include the place stories of specific towns and cities, the sociology of global travel, and whether or not it's possible to find enchantment in a disenchanted world.
The Sociology of Coming, Going, Leaving, and Staying
In this course we will examine how place can be used as a social index to understand people's everyday sense of social order and desire. We will start in the southern United States using both literary and critical sources to figure out what it means to be on the social insides and outsides of small town America, and then widen our scope to consider how these meanings have become idealized as a part of a broader national identity. We will then shift our analysis away from the United States to another part of the world, the island of Antigua, to document the social distances and differences between places around here and over there. Once our footing is established in places both familiar and exotic, we will study the history of map-making, slowly refocusing our analysis away from places outside the United States to inside, slowly refocusing our analysis away from places outside the United States to inside, re-entering the country through the southern city of Memphis, Tennessee. By re-entering the United States through Memphis, we will have brought our analysis around full circle, and will be able to re-ask and re-examine the question with which we started this course, namely, what does it mean to belong to a place and how do we map it.
Courses currently being revised or are in development
Rural Sociology