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• Soc 280AA: Sociology of Poverty (Fall, 2011)
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• Why, in the midst of great affluence, are people poor, and in some cases, persistently so? This question has captured the imagination of social scientists and social critics for over one century. In this course, we will become intimate with some of the key theoretical, critical, and empirical writings that seek to provide insight into this enduring problem. In the process, seminar participants will become familiar with the key issues and debates animating discussions of American sociologists: Is there a culture of poverty? Why does poverty persist in the face of economic growth? What accounts for the feminization and juvenilization of poverty? Does government intervention help, or does it just make matters worse? As seminar participants deepen their knowledge in these areas, they will learn to identify and interrogate key assumptions driving these interventions and the evolution of the field, generally, and hopefully they will begin to offer critical perspectives of their own.
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• Soc 124: Sociology of Poverty (Fall, 2011)
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• Why, in the midst of great affluence, are people poor, and in some cases, persistently so? Social scientists have put forth a number of explanations—culture of poverty and dependency, macroeconomic conditions, changing demographic trends, too much government coddling, not enough government intervention…These are just to name a few. This semester we will examine these explanations and interrogate their central assumptions. In the process, students will become informed about the likely causes of poverty amidst affluence, as well as what society needs to do to address this seemingly intractable problem.
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• Sociology 1: Introduction to Sociology (Fall, 2011)
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• Sociology is the study of the social—social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior. The primary objective of this course is to awaken students’ sociological imagination—to get students beyond the individual when trying to understand and explain human behavior—by helping them to see how social forces and social environments affect human behaviors in multiple and complex ways.
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• Sociology 273F: Qualitative Interviewing (FALL, 2010)
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• It has been said that we live in an “interview society.” Interviews are used in almost every walk of contemporary American life, and indeed roughly 90% of social science research involves interviewing of one sort or another. This course is designed to familiarize you with qualitative interviewing as a research methodology. The course is structured around eight steps or stages of the “interviewing process.” These include proposing a research question; providing a rationale for using interviewing as a research methodology; developing effective interview questions (and avoiding ineffective ones!); sampling and recruiting; considering issues in interviewing; interviewing itself; coding analyzing interview data; and writing up results. During the course of the semester, you will also become familiar with the IRB process, and we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various qualitative data analysis software packages. By the end of the course, students should have gained at least basic proficiency in undertaking a well-grounded, qualitative interview-based research project.
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• Sociology 131AC: Racial and Ethnic Inequality

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