This course covers sociological approaches to death and dying. Topics include social theory and theorists as they relate to death, American culture history, and contemporary issues regarding death and dying.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of sociology.

Topics vary from semester to semester and will be announced.

Demography is the scientific study of human populations. We will emphasize fertility, mortality, and migration, and the social and economic factors that affect them.

People often mistake ignorance as the mere lack of knowledge or that which we do not yet know. They fail to consider that ignorance exists in a variety of different forms, or that ignorance is often produced and maintained through sets of practices--whether intentional or not. This course investigates both ignorance and the consequences that particular forms of ignorance have upon our society.

Migration results from inequality, whether internal to societies or between countries. People migrate to better their lives, moving from poorer countries to wealthier ones in search of upward mobility. This makes migration a virtually unstoppable force, but it crashes into the immovable object known as the state. The resulting border conflicts and immigrant struggles to assimilate define the problem of immigration in the US.

Markets, firms, and money are part of everyday experience. Economists insist that they should work similarly independently of their social context. The central idea of economic sociology is that economic institutions are 'embedded' in social relations. We will study what embeddeness means, and what it implies. We look at how institutions constitute markets; how rationality varies; and how money interacts with social relations in unexpected ways.

Introduces the major theoretical issues and traditions in sociology, especially as developed in the writings of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Sociology majors are expected to take this course in their third year.

This course examines sociological theories of power and their intersections with culture. It focuses on oppression and social change in the 20th and 21st century U.S. through the lens of cultural expression, beliefs and meaning. It includes close reading of social theories of power and empirical studies of social institutions and social identities. Prerequisite: Six credits in Sociology or permission of instructor

Feminist Theory offers a focused exploration of ways that late 20th Century and early 21st Century feminist theorists challenge, alter and deploy central concerns and paradigms of Western cultural assumption. Although Feminist Theory as a category incorporates interdisciplinary and global perspectives, the slant of this course is a focus on Western culture and Feminist Social Theory.