Urban Studies

“The future belongs to the ghosts,” remarked the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1996, as his interlocutor, Bernard Stiegler, phrases the main idea behind that statement: “Modern technology, contrary to appearances, increases tenfold the power of ghosts.” With the advent of the internet, various forms of social media, and the ubiquity of filmic images in our lives, Derrida’s observations have proven to be quite prophetic, such that they call for a new field of study—one that requires less an ontology of being and the real and more a “hauntology” (to invoke Derrida’s punish term) of the spectral, the virtual, the phantasmic, the imaginary, and the recurrent revenant. In this seminar, we consider ways in which the past and present are haunted by ghosts and vexed by spectrality. Topics to be covered include: specters and hauntings, figures and apparitions, history and memory, trauma and political crisis, fantasy and imagination, digital interfaces, haunted data and archives, and visual and acoustical images. We will consider a range of films and video, photography, literary texts, acoustic reverberations, internet and social media, and everyday discourses and imaginings. Through these inquiries, we will be able to further our understanding of the nature of specters and apparitions in the contemporary world in their many forms and dimensions. Students will be invited to undertake their own hauntologies and thus craft studies of the phenomenal force of specters, hauntings, and the apparitional in particular social or cultural contexts.

Javanese shadow theatre, Bedouin love poems, and American community life are but a few of the sociocultural worlds that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic research is generally considered one of the best ways to form a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of a particular social world. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of such an approach, students will try their hands at ethnographic research and writing. In fall, each student will be asked to undertake an ethnographic research project in order to investigate the features of a specific social world—such as a homeless shelter, a religious festival, or a neighborhood in Brooklyn. In spring, students will craft a fully realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of that world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of ethnographic projects, such as interviewing others, the use of field notes, the interlacing of theory and data, the role of dialogue and the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course will explore the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity in styles both flamboyant and austere, growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

The visual arts and architecture constitute a central part of human expression and experience, both growing from and influencing our lives in profound ways that we might not consciously acknowledge. We will explore intersections between the visual arts and cultural, political, and social history with the goal of using art-history methods and theories to deal critically with works of art. This course is not a survey; rather, it will include a limited number of artists and works of art and architecture, which students will learn about in depth through formal analysis, readings, discussion, research, and debate. We will endeavor to understand each work from the point of view of its creators and patrons and by following its changing reception by audiences throughout time, including the ways in which those changes evoke political and social meanings. To accomplish this, we will need to understand some of the languages of art. The course, then, is also a course in visual literacy: the craft of reading and interpreting visual images on their own terms. We will also discuss a number of issues of contemporary concern; for instance, the destruction of art, free speech and respect of religion, the art market, and the museum.

This course will be about how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will look closely at how modern and contemporary critics and artists have defined the medium of sculpture in relation to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. We will begin with how theorists and writers described sculptural perception in the Enlightenment and beyond, consider the legacies of neoclassicism and the fraught status of sculpture in modernism, and conclude our story with large-scale installations in contemporary art. Along the way, we will explore sculptors remaking the category of sculpture by upsetting expectations for a stable object and blurring the boundaries between public monument and private encounter; using reproducible media to display their objects in the public realm; and making objects that incorporated commodities, functional things, bodies, raw matter, and detritus. The course will touch on discourses of neoclassicism, modernism, race and cultural memory, surrealism, minimalism, site-specificity, installation, feminism, and participatory art. Exploring a range of focused case studies—whenever possible through works in person—this course will ask what a 20th-century sculpture was and how it operated in the public realm. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

This seminar, broadly speaking, will cover introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including neoclassical, post-Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, and institutional political economy perspectives. The course will enable students to understand the more “technical aspects” of economics (e.g., usage of supply/demand analysis within and outside neoclassical economics), as well as significant economic history and the history of economic thought. Theoretical issues will be applied to contemporary policy debates such as industrial policy, foreign trade, global warming, and inequality.

Geospatial data is information associated with locations on the surface of the Earth and can include a variety of different types of data used in environmental science, such as sample collection locations at a field-study site, the areal extent of a forest biome, or the output generated by global climate models. The analysis of geospatial data also allows social scientists to identify disparities in access to natural resources or exposure to pollutants and hazards and has been critical to the study of environmental justice. This course provides an introduction to foundational concepts in physical geography and geodesy, cartography and geostatistics, along with practical experience in geospatial data analysis using open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. Although we will focus primarily on environmental applications, the skills learned in this course can be utilized in many natural and social-science disciplines, as well as to help you avoid getting lost!

A watershed is an area of land (and the ground that underlies it) that drains to a common outlet. This simple concept provides a critically important framework for understanding our most important water-management issues, along with many processes in environmental science and ecology. Watersheds can be defined across a range of spatial scales—from a suburban parking lot to the drainage basin of the Amazon River—and their diverse forms and characteristics represent a variety of climates, land-use practices, and topographies. In this course, we will learn how watersheds are delineated. The course will explore the flow of surface water through watersheds, covering topics such as precipitation, evapotranspiration, infiltration, and stream and river networks. In spring, students will build on this foundation to study groundwater flow and estuaries, along with topics in watershed management such as water infrastructure, urbanization, interbasin transfers, flooding, water quality, and the impacts of global climate change on hydrologic processes. Along with indoor seminars and data analysis activities, the course will include field visits to local waterways and water infrastructure sites. As the course will include problem sets, prior experience in algebra and geometry is required.

Where does the food we eat come from? Why do some people have enough food to eat and others do not? Are there too many people for the world to feed? Who controls the world’s food? Will global food prices continue their recent rapid rise; and, if so, what will be the consequences? What are the environmental impacts of our food-production systems? How do answers to these questions differ by place or the person asking the question? How have they changed over time? This course will explore the following fundamental issue: the relationship between development and the environment, focusing in particular on agriculture and the production and consumption of food. The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. We will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization,” as well as critical counterpoints that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of poverty and the making of the “Third World,” access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (e.g., the Green and Gene revolutions), biofuels, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation states to develop natural resources and agricultural production. Through a historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape, but rarely determine, the organization of resource use and agriculture; rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems—such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism—we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. The course will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; land grabbing and food security; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the interrelationship with climate change. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course will examine the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance and food sovereignty, alternative and community-supported agriculture, community-based resource-management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice. Films, multimedia materials, and potential distinguished guest lectures will be interspersed throughout the course. Attendance will be required for one farm/factory field trip. Regular postings of short essays will be required, as well as follow-up commentaries with classmates. There will be occasional in-class essays and a final quiz at the end of the semester. Group conferences will focus on in-depth analysis of certain course topics and will include debates, a film, workshopping, and small-group discussions. Students will prepare a poster project over the semester on a related topic presented at the end of the course in the final group conference.

This seminar will begin by examining competing paradigms and approaches to understanding “development” and the “Third World.” The course will set the stage by answering the question: What did the world look like 500 years ago? The purpose of this part of the course is to acquaint us with and to analyze the historical origins and evolution of a world political-economy of which the Third World is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial “development” to understand the evolving meaning of this term. These case studies will help assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role that some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political-economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities, as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development of institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, the course will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by Third World nation states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies; for example, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. The course will then turn to contemporary development debates and controversies; for example, the widespread land grabbing (by sovereign wealth funds, China, hedge funds, etc.), rising nationalism and anti-state populism, the contested role of international aid, and the climate-change crisis. Throughout the course, investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class—the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa but also from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions.

By the 20th century, African Americans produced a distinctive ethos and aesthetic of pleasure not only in music and dance but also in sports and other creative arts. Artists like Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane were paradigmatic in that cultural production. In turn, the blues ethos and jazz aesthetics influenced the African American imagination in social, political, economic, and cultural life, as well as in architecture and science.

This course will examine the distinctive leadership of women in the formation of the Black Freedom Movement. Departing from older scholarship that presents a “leading man” narrative of self-emancipation, this seminar will explore the rich lives and legacies of women, recognizing that they were their own liberators. From Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells to Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, and Assata Shakur, generations of leaders shaped the Black radical tradition. Students are invited to learn the epic yet untold stories of the “war on terror” pioneered by Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Claudia Jones, Esther Cooper Jackson, Denise Oliver-Velez, Ericka Huggins, Queen Mother Moore, Gloria Richardson, Septima Clark, Diane Nash, Ella Baker, and Vicki Garvin, alongside rethinking the legacies of Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Yuri Kochiyama, and so forth. Rather than examining one-dimensional caricatures of those leaders, this course will explore three-dimensional lives as well as their levers of power from cultural workshops to grassroots organizations.

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error—these terms and other statistical phrases have been bantered about before and seen interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this course will focus on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course; and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis. and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Statistical software will be introduced and used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with spreadsheet technology is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This course is recommended for any student wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data, and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences. 

Winston Churchill purportedly remarked that “we shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us,” suggesting that the built environment and geography, more generally, have a profound impact on society, culture, and politics. This course explicitly will take the study of politics and the social world out of the narrow and traditional views of political science—views that regularly see individuals as “atoms” that are, in the words of Kenneth Shepsle, “unconnected to the social structure in which he or she is embedded”—and, instead, look at how “politics and people” are embedded in particular spaces and places and networks are highly conditioned, based on specific locational qualities, histories, and features. This course rejects the idea that individuals are atoms and explicitly brings geography into the picture in our study of American politics at the start of the 21st century—in a moment of intense rancor and polarization. After examining theory and methodology, students will tackle a number of big issues that are hotly debated in academic, political, and policy circles vis-à-vis the built environment. One example is the ever-growing literature on geographic differences and regionalism in the United States as an underlying cause of American division and fractionalization. These geographic fissures do not fall along easy‐to‐map state lines but, rather, along a variety of regions in the United States that have been described and mapped by scholars in a number of social-science disciplines. We will examine and review a number of literatures and large amounts of localized data that will enable us to look more precisely into the numerous claims that there are nontrivial regional differences in terms of political beliefs, behaviors, and distinct regional political cultures. While American regions display varied histories and cultures, the question that we will attempt to answer is whether these histories and cultures have an impact on contemporary political attitudes, behaviors, and social values. We will take on similar empirical topics throughout the year, using many tools available from the social sciences—from GIS to historical election and economic data—to examine issues of welfare, mobility, and “hollowing out the middle”; employment; innovation; gerrymandering and issues of representation; competition over natural resources; mass transit and the impact of transportation and highways on sociopolitical development; and urban and rural differences. Many of these topics will be familiar, but the tools through which we examine them will be via a geospatial lens; and the way in which we understand the surrounding politics will, hopefully, be more complete when compared to the traditional lenses of political science. This seminar will be an open, nonpartisan forum for discussion and debate and, as such, driven by data, not dogma. We will use a variety of approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to various puzzles about American policy and will treat this material as social scientists, not ideologues. Comfort with numbers and statistics is expected, and group work along with fieldwork will be a regular feature of this seminar. Biweekly in fall and spring, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include research and fieldwork.

Despite frequent pleas for unity from United States presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, alongside the rise of groups such as BridgeUSA, Third Way, and No Labels to promote political centrism and compromise, the seemingly never-ending sociopolitical polarization appears to be the new norm in American political life—and it may not have reached its violent peak back in January 2021. To many politicians, pundits, and others alike, the social and political scene in the United States in the 21st century appears to be one of turmoil, disagreement, division, and instability. We regularly hear about a polarized and deadlocked political class; we read about increasing class and religious differences—from the alleged divides between Wall Street and Main Street to those who are secular and those who are religious; and we often see disturbing, dangerous, and violent images and actions from various politically-oriented groups. This seminar will look at the history of division in America and explore the puzzle of how to move on from this divided state. While the course will briefly examine the veracity of these recent impressions of the American sociopolitical scene, we will center our course on the question: Is policymaking forever deadlocked, or can real political progress be made? Moreover, what are the social and policy implications of polarization? How does the nation govern and function in the Trumpian political epoch, and are the political parties representing the will of the people? What about the impact of the 2024 elections? What are we to make of the frequent calls for change and for healing America’s divisions? In this seminar, we will examine these questions and deeper aspects of American political culture today. Covering a lot of ground from America’s founding to today, after reviewing some basics of the political economy, students will study American political cultures from a variety of vantage points with a number of different stories emerging. We will look at numerous aspects of American social and political life—from examining the masses, political elites, Congress, and policymaking communities to social movements, the media, and America’s position in a global community—all with a focus on policy and moving the country forward. This course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use modern political-economy approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to contemporary public-policy problems and questions of polarization. The material will be treated as social scientists, not as ideologues. Students should anticipate extensive reading. Comfort with data and statistics will be expected.

This community-partnership course will focus on the health of humans living within physical, social, and psychological urban spaces. We will use a constructivist, multidisciplinary, multilevel lens to examine the interrelationship between humans and the natural and built environment, to explore the impact of social-group (ethnic, racial, sexuality/gender) membership on person/environment interactions, and to explore an overview of theoretical and research issues in the psychological study of health and illness across the lifespan. We will examine theoretical perspectives in the psychology of health, health cognition, illness prevention, stress, and coping with illness. We will also highlight research, methods, and applied issues. This class is appropriate for those interested in a variety of health careers or for anyone interested in city life. The community-partnership/service-learning component is an important part of this class; for one morning or afternoon per week, students will work in local community agencies to promote health-adaptive, person/environment interactions within our community. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that will include discussion of the nature of academic work and research, reading, writing, and editing skills. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

When is sex not a natural act? Every time a human engages in sexual activity. In sex, what is done by whom, with whom, where, when, why, and with what has very little to do with biology. Human sexuality poses a significant challenge in theory. The study of its disparate elements (biological, social, and individual/psychological) is inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking; from anthropologists to zoologists, all angles of study add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and meanings. From an intersectional perspective, in this course, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Race, ethnicity, gender, and social class, among other identities, impact sexuality both individually and structurally. Within each period, we will examine biological, social, and psychological factors that inform the experience of sexuality for individuals. We will also examine broader aspects of sexuality, including sexual health and sexual abuse. Conference projects may range from empirical research to a bibliographic research project.

In this research internship course, students will gain research experience through active engagement in a psychology research lab with a member of the psychology faculty. This will involve an internship within a research lab on campus, including a weekly lab meeting, a weekly collaborative meeting across labs, ongoing contributions toward research and practice within their lab and/or community settings, additional individual and group meetings as needed, and additional synchronous and asynchronous research work. Weekly lab meetings will involve reading and discussing research articles and research-methods papers specific to the topics of research being undertaken by each student and faculty member. Students will be expected to learn the current research approaches being employed by their supervising faculty member and to contribute toward ongoing research in the form of a research practicum. Students may also have the opportunity to develop and implement their own independent research projects within the labs in which they are working, depending on lab priorities. Students will be expected to make progress on research projects between meetings, as determined in collaboration with their primary supervising faculty. The weekly collaborative cross-labs meeting will include readings on, and discussions of, research methods and ethics—both broad and specific to the research in which students are involved—as well as the discussion of contemporary research articles that are relevant to student and faculty research projects. All faculty and students involved in the research experience will take turns leading the discussion of current research, with faculty taking the lead at the beginning of the semester and students taking the lead as their expertise develops. Students participating in the course will be expected to attend and actively participate in weekly collaborative cross-labs meetings and weekly lab meetings; keep an ongoing journal and/or scientific lab notebook; select and facilitate group and lab discussions of relevant contemporary research articles (at least once for each meeting type); work within a lab and/or community setting, as appropriate for their projects; contribute toward ongoing research and practice within their lab or community settings; report on their ongoing lab research in the form of a short paper prepared for possible publication and a poster at the Science and Math Poster Symposium; and provide their colleagues with ongoing verbal and written feedback on their projects. Students will be responsible for working collaboratively with their colleagues to further develop their understanding of each of the topics covered in class.

In this research internship course, students will gain research experience through active engagement in a psychology research lab with a member of the psychology faculty. This will involve an internship within a research lab on campus, including a weekly lab meeting, a weekly collaborative meeting across labs, ongoing contributions toward research and practice within their lab and/or community settings, additional individual and group meetings as needed, and additional synchronous and asynchronous research work. Weekly lab meetings will involve reading and discussing research articles and research-methods papers specific to the topics of research being undertaken by each student and faculty member. Students will be expected to learn the current research approaches being employed by their supervising faculty member and to contribute toward ongoing research in the form of a research practicum. Students may also have the opportunity to develop and implement their own independent research projects within the labs in which they are working, depending on lab priorities. The weekly collaborative cross-labs meeting will include readings on, and discussions of, various concepts in research related to open science practices, finding funding/grant writing, collecting and analyzing data, as well as the discussion of contemporary research articles that are relevant to student and faculty research projects. All faculty and students involved in the research experience will take turns leading the discussion of current research, with faculty taking the lead at the beginning of the semester and students taking the lead as their expertise develops. Students participating in the course will be expected to attend and actively participate in weekly collaborative cross-labs meetings and weekly lab meetings; keep an ongoing journal and/or scientific lab notebook; select and facilitate group and lab discussions of relevant contemporary research articles (at least once for each meeting type); work within a lab and/or community setting, as appropriate for their projects; contribute toward ongoing research and practice within their lab or community settings; report on their ongoing lab research in the form of a short paper prepared for possible publication and a poster at the Science and Math Poster Symposium; and provide their colleagues with ongoing verbal and written feedback on their projects. Students will be responsible for working collaboratively with their colleagues to further develop their understanding of each of the topics covered in class.

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things that we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship of the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Much of our lives is spent dealing with organizations in one fashion or another; they are a staple of our everyday lives, whether directly or indirectly, and we rarely escape them. They include government and nongovernmental structures, ranging from government bureaucracies to schools, hospitals, religious spaces, and less formal entities such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Because of their ubiquitousness—and the assumption that bureaucracies exemplify “modernity” and “value-free” systems—the study of organizations has been a key subfield within sociology. This course will address the veracity of the claims made on behalf of bureaucracies, as well as critiques directed at organizational theory and behavior. Overarching objectives include examining the manner in which organizations have been conceptualized, as well as the processes and practices through which they operate and change and their implications for those who are “subjected” to them. Beginning with Max Weber, a seminal figure in the field, we will examine underlying assumptions regarding “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” the rule of law, bureaucratic activism and inertia, the relation between organizations and their larger political and economic milieu, as well as ongoing organizational struggles. In addition to Weber, we will read other classics, such as Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and William Whyte’s The Organization Man. These and more contemporary critiques of organizations—both written and visual—will enable us to go beyond simplistic and normative understandings of bureaucracies and classic sociological theories and texts to rethink historical and contemporary organizations in order to analyze the functioning of power at an everyday and structural level alongside its attendant outcomes. While applicable to sociology students and those studying social sciences, this course will also be of direct relevance to rethinking the workings of science and medicine, the law, education, the business world, the media, and/or the arts. For conference, working in small groups, students will undertake archival and/or ethnographic research on a specific aspect of organizational practice at Sarah Lawrence—historical and/or contemporary. Possible topics include an examination of space and design, changes in the student body and/or curricular design, processes of decision making, student governance and activism, and/or the relationship between the school and its environs.

Cities are shaped not only by official policies and infrastructures but also by the informal and everyday interactions that blur boundaries between legality and illegality, local and global, self and other. This seminar will explore informality as a defining feature of urban life and globalization, examining how people navigate unregulated economies; build informal networks of care and survival; and redefine cosmopolitanism through daily acts of negotiation, adaptation, and contamination. Using a transnational and ethnographic lens, we will look at how informal economies—street vending, unregistered housing, underground labor networks—shape cities from the margins. We will also examine cultural and social “contaminations,” where urban residents of different class, racial, ethnic, and migratory backgrounds encounter and transform each other’s ways of life—sometimes in conflict, sometimes in collaboration. Rather than viewing informality as a “problem” to be solved, we will investigate how it can be a form of survival, resistance, and even innovation. Key themes include the role of informal housing and precarious urbanism, as seen in slums, refugee camps, and do-it-yourself architecture, as well as the dynamics of street economies and alternative labor structures. We will explore how migrant communities shape transnational place making; the politics of food, music, and everyday cultural hybridity; and how public space is governed, contested, and informally negotiated in cities. These intersecting themes highlight the ways in which urban life is constantly being reshaped through both structural constraints and human agency. Readings will include works by Teresa Caldeira, Asef Bayat, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ananya Roy, and Saskia Sassen, alongside ethnographic case studies of cities in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America. Students will conduct ethnographic fieldwork—exploring the informal landscapes of urban spaces, neighborhoods, and/or digital communities around them—as part of conference work. These projects can culminate in ethnographic essays, photo essays, digital maps, or multimedia storytelling. This course is designed for students interested in urban studies, migration, globalization, and the sociology of everyday life. No previous background in sociology is required, but students should be ready to engage in active field observation, lots of field note-writing, discussion, and critical and creative thinking.

The traditional Western house is subdivided into smaller spaces and rooms through social means. Such rooms embody a situated hierarchy set forth by the notion of the “paterfamilias” and “dominus,” or traditional heads of the family. The division of rooms and their functions reiterate this nuclear-family structure, furthering the separation from the outside world and of everyone within the house. This partitioning of space further defines private and public; and the shelter, protection, and safety that the home provides “is inseparable from the immense economic, technological, and political structures that produce it.” Therefore, the house is also intertwined with the “framework of political organization” in its physicality and its imbued implication of “labor, work, and political action.” This course is titled from an extended essay by Virginia Woolf and a Dogma-presented architectural exhibition and corresponding exhibition catalogue on domestic space. Students will research the house, based on objects, aesthetics, and spatial tensions. These subjects are also connected to the financial aspect of the person or persons within the room and the house. The representation of these aspects will be key, as they bring up cultural norms and styles to counter these norms through design, making, and research. How do we represent the room today within political, economic, and social concerns? How do objects inform, shape, dictate, and influence our understanding of this room? What histories bring us to this point in time, where the room is prescribed to us through modernism? Lastly, how does this room relate to the rest of the house?

This course will look at typologies of labor, with their embedded leisure and amenities used as tools for greater work output. Questions will arise regarding the work/life versus work/leisure paradigm and the blurred line between them. Counter examples will include the festivals and fairgrounds as a site of leisure and the home that functions as a device of release from work; but is work still happening on these sites? Through readings and other media—drawing, collage, and mapping—students will identify the experiences in these materials, how they function with or against the norms of society, and what the future of these spaces linked to “play” symbolizes for them. What aspects of leisure are considered necessity versus desire, and what is the role of aesthetics in these spaces? Students will design an intervention of the chosen site as a means of critique, analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual design within our present political, social, economic, and climatic issues—which are inextricably linked to our production and reproduction, with labor and leisure at its core.

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read several types of narratives—children’s books, folktales, fairy tales, and graphic novels—trying our own written hand at many of these styles. Readings will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students might create graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, or dystopian fictions with pictures as examples of past imaginations. This course will be especially suited to students with an interest in another artistic form or a body of knowledge that they would like to make accessible to nonspecialists. 

As central to the historical development of the modern essay as its concern with personal experience is the essay’s usefulness in politics and the representation of political experience. The essay can be polemical, informative, argumentative, lyrical, intimate, condemnatory. It can narrate and describe, or it can persuade or cajole, or it can satirize. As an open, improvisational form, the essay is particularly suited to giving depth to individual experience by placing that experience in social and political contexts and among allegiances and identities—and also suited to imparting drama to collective experience by locating the individual within his, her, or their social conditions and conflicts. We will follow this give and take in our readings, which will be across the reasonable political spectrum. Some examples: Samuel Taylor Coleridge on William Pitt the Younger, George Orwell on his education, H. L. Mencken on The Presidency, James Baldwin in Switzerland, Joan Didion on the counterculture, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson on patriarchy, Mike Davis on class and the politics of firefighting in contemporary Los Angeles, and a series of recent editorials and op-eds about our ever-present political crises. These various pieces will be used as models for our own writing, which will range from the small to the medium to the large and will be presented to the class for critique of both their rhetorical realizations and their plausibility or implausibility.