Intended for first-year students in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Introduces students to liberal arts; familiarizes them with their major; develops the academic skills necessary to succeed (analytical ability and critical thinking); provides grounding in the culture and values of the University community; and helps to develop interpersonal skills&amp;#8212;in short, familiarizes students with all skills needed to become a successful university student.

SOCL

Sociology at Northeastern

Explores diverse social phenomena, from how people try to look their best in face-to-face interactions; to how race, gender, and class shape identities and social conditions; to how industrial capitalism came to dominate the world. Offers students an opportunity to gain a grasp of key sociological theories and empirical research on topics such as social order, social conflict, and social change, as well as learn to identify social forces that shape human behavior, explain how these forces affect individuals and social groups, and make valid predictions about how they may shape future behavior or events.

Introduction to Sociology

Examines how femininities, masculinities, and different forms of sexual identity are produced and represented within popular culture. Using theories and concepts from both feminist/sexuality studies and popular culture studies, analyzes popular texts and media for their treatment of gender and sexuality and the intersection of those categories with racial and class identities. Explores the visual representation of women (and men) and analyzes how visual and textual media shape our attitudes and identities. Required reading and assignments include close readings of texts, film screenings, class discussions and activities, writing assignments, and creative projects.

Sex, Gender, and Popular Culture

Examines the social, political, and economic forces behind the global environmental crisis. Topics include such issues as global warming and climate disruption, world resource availability and the global economic crisis, environmental justice and social inequities in the exposure to ecological hazards, science and technology, environmental degradation in the Third World, globalization and unfair trade, state power and the role of the polluter-industrial complex in the United States, the history of the environmental movement, and exemplary environmental policies and programs. This theoretically oriented course also involves practical experience in environmental problem solving.

Environment and Society

Considers why and how gender is socially constructed in U.S. society and looks at different theories of gender. Explores gender as an institution as well as different (cultural) expressions of masculinities and femininities. Includes topics of gender in everyday life as well as gender as an organizing principle in the institutions of families, education, workplaces, sexualities, religion, the media, politics, and forms of gender violence. SOCL 1260 and WMNS 1260 are cross-listed.

Gender in a Changing Society

Analyzes the transformation of work since the advent of industrial capitalism. Emphasizes the organization and experience of work since World War II and the contemporary shifts underway in the wake of deindustrialization, the rise of service work, the emergence of the internet, the platform revolution, and the globalization of business organizations. Topics include the shifting nature of authority relations at work; changing forms of labor control; types of workplace culture in traditional and high-tech settings; and efforts to identify and reduce bias against women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Addresses dilemmas arising from the introduction of advanced technologies.

The Twenty-First-Century Workplace

Introduces students to the range of research methods used by sociologists. Covers experimental research, field research, survey research, and historical-comparative research. Sampling, the rules of evidence in empirical research, research ethics, and the place of values are discussed. Required for sociology majors.

Research Methods in Sociology

Introduces and sensitizes students to the forms, practices, and effects of racism and discrimination on the various populations in the United States and presents frameworks for understanding and working with people with histories of discrimination and different cultural identities. Pays special attention to human services with diverse populations in schools, prisons, and employment assistance programs.

Race, Identity, Social Change, and Empowerment

Introduces students to pressing urban issues: urban sprawl, poverty, education, transportation, economic development, and housing, through an intensive analysis of the Boston metropolitan area. The course is cotaught by university faculty and practitioners in government, community, and nonprofit organizations throughout the metropolitan area. Offers students the opportunity to analyze Boston data, go on outings to see development in progress, talk with urban practitioners about what they do, and conduct research on an urban issue of their choice.

Current Issues in Cities and Suburbs

Focuses on the connections between the development of modern nation-states and the control of nature. Explores the role human societies play in such events as climate change, tsunamis, and droughts. Asks how industrialization and the process of science and technology development are related to our transforming environmental conditions, as well as how the social sciences, the sciences, and engineering are transforming to address these issues. Draws on social theory, environmental history, anthropology/sociology, art/design, and open-source technologies to investigate theoretically and methodologically the sources, experiences of, and solutions for environmental health questions.

ANTH

CRIM

HUSV

INTL

POLS

Environment, Technology, and Society

Examines the relationship between race and the movement of people around the globe. Offers students an opportunity to acquire a concrete understanding of how race and ethnicity (as social constructions) have developed as people have migrated (under free will or forced circumstances) within and across geopolitical territories (e.g, colonies, countries) in the past (1400s) and through the present. Ethnoracial-related conflicts connected to migration (e.g., rebellions by the enslaved during the Atlantic slave trade, Rwandan genocide, Syrian civil war) may also be explored.

Race and Global Human Mobility

Introduces key issues, themes, and debates in feminist transnational theory, practice, and activism in contemporary contexts and how it has changed under socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes of globalization. Examines differences among women relating to race, class, sexuality, national identity, and political economy in reckoning with possibilities for sustainable social justice. Students interrogate the relationship between the local and global; the production of knowledge in different regional spaces; the pragmatics of political mobilization; the varying contours of &amp;#8220;social justice&amp;#8221;; and other key issues. Offers students an opportunity to discuss the impact of globalization, neoliberalism, and state and intimate violence on gendered politics and relations and to contend with the politics of difference, to debate its challenges, and to imagine possible futures for transnational gender justice.

Gender, Social Justice, and Transnational Activism

Examines the notion of violence and its pervasive presence in the social institutions we create and maintain every day. Addresses key debates and findings in sociological literature on violence, drawing on other disciplines as they prove helpful. Sociology tells us that the beliefs, values, and norms that characterize the United States legitimize the preference for violence, largely through the obvious venues of the mass media that glorify violence but also in the subtler structural arrangements collectively constructed and maintained in our everyday behaviors. Offers students an opportunity to understand how the structure of our society and its social institutions inhibit or facilitate violent behavior.

Violence and Society

Reviews the dominant theoretical traditions in classical and contemporary sociology, showing the links between the social thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and current social thought.

ENGL

ENGW

Social Theory

Offers a substantial overview of the sociology of health and illness. Medical sociology is an important subfield of sociology with important links to public health, social psychology, psychology, and other medical fields. Emphasizes several critical areas: society and disease; theoretical understandings of health inequalities; medicalization and social control; healthcare professions and professionalization; and the American healthcare system. Offers students an opportunity to obtain analytical frameworks to explore other topics in medical sociology not covered in this course.

Sociology of Health and Illness

Explores theories and research on the institutionalized forms of inequality that have accompanied the rise of advanced capitalism in Western society. Major topics include the competing definitions of class that have developed among social scientists; the relation between class and race in the United States; how class and gender have intersected historically; and the link between workers&#39; movements, political systems, and the forms that capitalist development has assumed in Western Europe and the United States. Students conduct projects in which they explore the conceptions of social justice held by members of subordinate groups.

Class, Power, and Social Change

Considers the intersection of race, class, and gender in social structure, institutions, and people&amp;#8217;s lives. Utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to focus on the socially constructed nature of these concepts and how they shape and create meaning in individual lives. Difference with an emphasis on inequality and varying life chances is central for understanding our society and is central to our work. Requires a significant amount of reading. Class format is like a seminar; students are expected to participate, take responsibility, and write a paper. SOCL 4520 and WMNS 4520 are cross-listed.

Race, Class, and Gender

Offers students an opportunity to engage in advanced social science research on topics relating to environmental justice, citizen science, and environmental health. Examines various environmental justice topics with the goal of producing a research project or paper. Case studies examined include the impacts of toxic waste dumping on human health and the environment, the role of global climate change in creating new waves of migration around the world, the rise of the Slow Food movement, and the relationship between environmental and data justice. Studies how to redesign research methods, tools, and processes to support environmental justice.

PHIL

Environmental Justice

Offers students an opportunity to integrate and apply knowledge of the discipline by building on completed course work and conducting original research on a topic of their choice. Requires students to produce a research paper due at the end of the semester. This seminar operates as an intellectual workshop in which students share the process, as well as the results, of their research with the group. The class comes together to inform, guide, critique, and support one another&amp;#8217;s research efforts in a collaborative fashion. Students are expected to make constructive comments on the work of others and to freely exchange ideas.

Senior Seminar

Helps first-year students develop a firm understanding of the PhD Sociology program requirements and helps them develop beneficial skills and strategies to complete those requirements in a timely manner. Focus on relevant topics such as articulating learning expectations from the graduate program; developing individual timelines and time management strategies to meet those expectations; identifying resources on campus and beyond that are needed to meet learning expectations; and developing concrete goals for acquiring appropriate writing, reading skills, and research areas expertise in the PhD program.

Proseminar 1: Acclimating to Graduate School

Helps students develop beneficial skills and strategies to complete program requirements and become more professionalized as sociologists. This third proseminar provides the structure and peer feedback designed to help students build and work through their first field statement reading list. Students produce an annotated bibliography. The weekly exercises are designed to help students create the reading list in collaboration with faculty mentors and other experts in the field.

Proseminar 3: Committee, Topics, and Reading Lists

Studies the classic theorists including Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and others.

Foundations of Social Theory 1

Offers a broad survey of scholarly debates on the redistribution of political power, economic power, and social capital across the globe. Emphasizes an ethnographic analysis of how colonial and imperial legacies inform contemporary arrangements that structure inequality and how political imaginations are exercised through aesthetics, identities, and institutions. Considers how experiments with economic justice and juridical and political forms of justice find expression in contemporary grassroots movements and theories. Draws on interdisciplinary conversations from the social sciences and humanities to examine and compare radical forms of social change across various global contexts.

Economy, Politics, and Social Change

Explores the social psychological dimensions of structured social inequality. Overviews the &amp;#8220;social psychologies&amp;#8221; embedded in the classical social theorists, then explores the literature on sociological social psychology (as opposed to its psychological cousin), identifying key theoretical frameworks and focusing on &amp;#8220;social structure and personality&amp;#8221; (or &amp;#8220;social structure and attitudes&amp;#8221;) research. Explores relevant literatures on various &amp;#8220;subjective&amp;#8221; responses to stratification including the self-concept, stratum (that is, race, class, or gender) identification and consciousness, the process of legitimation, stratification beliefs (or stratification ideology), racial attitudes, and links between these phenomena and various policy attitudes and preferences (support for affirmative action, wealth redistribution, and so on). Also explores the ways in which such responses may contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of the status quo (social reproduction), and social change.

Social Psychology of Stratification

Comprises reading and research directed by a faculty member. May be repeated without limit.

Directed Study

Taken while completing one of two PhD field statements under faculty supervision.

Exam Preparation&amp;#8212;Doctoral

Offers the student the opportunity to conduct full-time research. May be repeated without limit.

Research

Offers theoretical and experimental work conducted under the supervision of a departmental faculty.

Dissertation Term 1

Offers dissertation supervision by members of the department.

Dissertation Term 2

Offers continued thesis work conducted under the supervision of a departmental faculty.