Gender and Sexuality Studies

This course provides an overview of key contemporary theories, concepts, issues, and debates in Gender Studies. Students will glean an overview of the field of Gender Studies and its emergence from Women's Studies and advocacy for women's rights. Students will become familiar with key concepts from current gender scholarship. Students will develop and complete an applied gender-studies project with real-world applications that they can then share with other students. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing.
(Normally offered each spring semester.)

This course explores a broad overview of big ideas about humans, society, change, stability, and chaos that have influenced sociology and other social sciences in the 19th to early 21st centuries. Broad perspectives examined include: Marxism, Functionalism, Weberian rationalization, Symbolic Interactionism, Feminisms, Queer Theory, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Rational Choice, Postmodernism and Poststructuralism, and theories of globalization. This course builds critical thinking, analysis, application, and writing skills essential to majors, minors, and students interested in critically examining society.
Prerequisite(s): SOC 1110 Introduction to Sociology.
(Normally offered each fall semester.)

This course offers an integrated overview of the complex interplay of the shifting realms of law and society. We depart from an analysis of the law as a set of social institutions, a construction of particular historical, cultural, economic and political conditions. We then interrogate the ways that social structures, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, as well capitalism, modernity and patriarchy influence the construction of law and legal doctrines. In turn, we explore how the resulting definitions of normativity and deviance, social control and liberty, as well as rights and freedoms serve to feed difference, inequality and injustice in society. But while law is often viewed as the realm of status quo and oppression, it is also often mobilized by laypersons, social movements, cause lawyers and public litigants to affect social change. Therefore, in this course, we investigate the complex relationship between law, social control and social change, delving into some of the most transformative moments of American law, and society, simultaneously.

Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing.

This course offers an integrated overview of the complex interplay of the shifting realms of law and society. We depart from an analysis of the law as a set of social institutions, a construction of particular historical, cultural, economic and political conditions. We then interrogate the ways that social structures, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, as well capitalism, modernity and patriarchy influence the construction of law and legal doctrines. In turn, we explore how the resulting definitions of normativity and deviance, social control and liberty, as well as rights and freedoms serve to feed difference, inequality and injustice in society. But while law is often viewed as the realm of status quo and oppression, it is also often mobilized by laypersons, social movements, cause lawyers and public litigants to affect social change. Therefore, in this course, we investigate the complex relationship between law, social control and social change, delving into some of the most transformative moments of American law, and society, simultaneously.

Prerequisite(s): SOC 1110 Introduction to Sociology.

This course explores social stratification, the socially created pattern of unequal distribution of social resources that leads to social inequality. It gives particular attention to social class, but also considers how class intersects with other social categories (such as race/ethnicity and gender) to create even further inequality. It also examines the interconnectedness of social inequality and the primary social institutions of U.S. society. It also explores global social inequality.
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing.
(Normally offered alternate years.)