Course	SOC 101 Introduction to Sociology
Professor	Amy Ansell
CRN	90045
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 204
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: Social Science

Cross listed: American Studies, Environmental Studies

The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to the sociological perspective. Its goal is to illuminate the way in which social forces impinge on our individual lives and affect human society. The course is organized into four main parts. In the first, key sociological concepts and methods will be introduced via the study of the `fathers’ of sociology: Durkheim, Weber, and Marx. In the second part, we will examine the significance of various forms of social inequality, particularly those based on class, race, and gender. We will then survey several important social institutions: the family, the economic order, and education. The fourth and final part of the course will focus on the inter-related issues of social movements and social change.

Course	SOC 120 Inequality in America
Professor	Yuval Elmelech
CRN	90046
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 203
Distribution	OLD: C/E	NEW: Social Science / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender Studies, Human Rights, Social Policy, SRE

Why do some people have more wealth, more power, and receive greater respect than others? What are the sources of this inequality? Is social inequality inevitable? Is it undesirable? Through lectures, documentary films and discussions, this course examines the ways by which socially-defined categories of persons (e.g., women and men, Blacks and Whites, rich and poor, native- and foreign-born) are unevenly rewarded for their social contributions. Sociological theories are used to explain how and why social inequality is produced and maintained, and how it affects the well being of individuals and social groups. The course will focus on two general themes. The first deals with the structure of inequality while studying the unequal distribution of material and social resources (e.g., prestige, income, occupation). The second examines the processes that determine the allocation of people to positions in the stratification system (e.g. education, intelligence, parental wealth, gender, race).

Course	SOC 234 Science and Society: Debates on Race and Genetics
Professor	Amy Ansell
CRN	90048
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 203
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Human Rights, SRE, STS

This course revisits the study of race and ethnicity in the context of emerging genetic research. It focuses on the `genetic turn’ in scholarship on human genetic variation, placing it within its social and cultural history and examining its implications for our understanding of the category race. The course is structured historically, beginning with examination of the history of the race concept in anthropology, the eugenics movement in the U.S., and eugenics in Nazi Germany. Next, more recent anthropological and sociological accounts of race are surveyed in relation to the genomics revolution. This revolution has witnessed the rapid growth in the development of technologies for genetic analysis, a technical change that has led to achievements such as the completion of the human genome sequences. Finally, we consider the implications and potential social consequences of this emerging research on human genetic variation across scientific domains such as health and disease (including racialized medicine), genetic screening, and forensics.

Course	SOC 242 Historical Sociology of Punishment
Professor	Michael Donnelly
CRN	90047
Schedule	Mon Wed 12:00 -1:20 pm OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Social Science / Rethinking Difference

(This course is affiliated with and sponsored by the Bard Prison Initiative FIPSE Project.)

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Social Policy

An analysis of punishment, and the rationales for punishing, in a variety of historical circumstances. Cases are drawn from primitive societies, Puritan New England, 18^th and 19^th century western Europe, the American South, and the recent period in the United States and Great Britain. Comparisons among such disparate cases will suggest broad developmental patterns in punishment, and more specific queries about the connections between culture, social structure, and penal strategies. The case materials also offer a historical perspective on such contemporary issues and controversies as the scope of criminal responsibility, the appropriateness of retribution, the declining concern for rehabilitating offenders, and the rationales for, and uses of, the death penalty.

Course	SOC 247 Sociology of Marriage & Family
Professor	Yuval Elmelech
CRN	90100
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 – 11:50 am OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender Studies, Social Policy

How do we choose the people we date and eventually marry? Why do people divorce and remarry? What effect does marital separation have upon the success of children later in life? This course uses sociological literature to study these questions. Focusing primarily on family patterns in the United States, the course examines the processes of partner selection, the configuration of gender and family roles, and the interrelationships among family and household members. Topics include explanations of religious and racial/ethnic inter-marriage; household and work roles; divorce and remarriage; parenthood and single parenthood; intergenerational relationships.

Course	SOC 304 Contemporary Sociological Theory
Professor	Michael Donnelly
CRN	90049
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm OLIN 304
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Human Rights

A critical investigation into the development of modern sociological theories in the United States and Europe. The course will examine, among other schools and traditions, functionalism, conflict theory, exchange and rational choice theory, symbolic interactionism, feminist theory, and critical theory. Readings include works by Talcott Parsons, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jon Elster, George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Dorothy Smith, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas. Prerequisite: Sociology 203 or permission of the instructor.

Course	HIST / SOC 3125 Immigration and American Society: Racializing and De-racializing the Immigrant, 1880-1940
Professor	Joel Perlmann
CRN	90024
Schedule	Wed 7:30 -9:50 pm OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: History

Cross-listed: American studies, Human rights

Related interest: Africana Studies, SRE, Jewish Studies

Between 1880 and 1920, new immigrant groups - Slavs, Italians and Jews in particular - came in unprecedented numbers to the United States. Americans - radicals, liberals and progressives as well as conservatives - worried about how these new peoples would be absorbed into American life, and whether America's unique culture and political arrangements would not be hopelessly distorted by the change. The terms in which this discussion was carried on - in history, the social sciences and in imaginative literature - were changing too. Explicitly racial thought ("scientific racism") helped cast the new European immigrant groups as members of different races. There is a debate among historians of our own time over whether those European immigrants of 1880-1920 were "racialized" in the same way as blacks were racialized. Did the new immigrants (and their descendants) have to "become white" over the years (in part by distancing themselves from blacks) or were they "white on arrival"? By the 1920s the United States had adopted very restrictive anti-immigration laws, not merely meant to keep the number of immigrants low but also aimed explicitly at keeping the number of Slavs, Italians and Jews low. In addition, the new law continued the bar on Asians. The seminar will examine these developments, with extensive readings from the time (imaginative as well as social scientific) -- as well as from the historical debate of our own time about the whiteness of the immigrants. We will also study how the racialized view of the immigrant came to decline at the end of the time period covered. Each student will also chose a particular research topic that will culminate in a term paper, also based on extensive readings from the period as well as on recent historical studies. Enrollment limited to 12.

Course	SOC 351 Cities of Injustice? Critical Geographies of Late Modern USA
Professor	Neil Brenner
CRN	90422
Schedule	Fr 1:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 203
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Social Science

(This course is affiliated with and sponsored by the Bard Prison Initiative FIPSE Project.)

This seminar will explore the contemporary urban condition in the USA and beyond.  Our goal is to develop analytical tools through which to decipher and critically interpret some of the large-scale transformations of urban economic, political and social life that have unfolded during the last thirty years, with specific reference to questions of social justice and injustice. The course will be framed around the following broad questions: In what ways have cities become the sites for the production and entrenchment of new forms of class-based and ethnoracial inequality/injustice? How are such inequalities expressed in, and reproduced through, the spatial organization of the metropolis? What are the origins and causes of such inequalities? How have processes of urban restructuring transformed the meaning of citizenship and social justice within major US urban regions? What are the prospects for creating more socially and spatially just cities in the coming years and decades? The theoretical foundations of the seminar will build toward a series of case studies, one of which will be focused around questions of 'hyperghettoization' and mass incarceration in the U.S.