My pedagogical strategies aim to instill in students not only specific knowledge of a given subject, but also a sense of the wider world around them. Most importantly, I want students to leave our classes together with the critical skills and temperament necessary for informed participation in an interdependent and globalizing world. Open-ended discussion, close readings, and writing assignments that lend choice and voice to students all contribute to this greater purpose.
I include here the course descriptions of a few classes I teach at Grinnell College. Please contact me directly for complete copies of course syllabuses.
SOC 111 Introduction to Sociology
This course offers an introduction to the contemporary issues sociologists study and how they go about their work. Central to our readings and discussions is the challenge of social and economic inequality in the modern world. This focus on inequality originally motivated the founding of the discipline, and it remains a subject of greater sociological concern in light of the increasing divide between rich and poor in America and around the world, generally. We pay special attention to the ways in which material conditions shape and reflect various forms of identity and experience, especially in regards to race, culture, and gender.
SOC 220 Sociology of Global Development
This course investigates conditions of development in world historical perspective. We begin, first, with a discussion of political and economic practices pursued initially by Great Britain, and how these practices eventually came to influence the shape and pace of development in France, Germany, and, eventually, the US through the turn of the twentieth century. We then compare the development paths of early and late developers. We interrogate the ways in which dominant political and economic models frame expectations for development in the modern era, and with what impact in everyday lives of ordinary citizens, in positive and negative ways. The central problem of the course is which states develop, in which circumstances, and why.
SOC 235 Inequality, Capital & Class
In this course, students engage with traditional and contemporary debates on the role of socioeconomic class in allocating resources and influencing life chances within capitalist societies. We necessarily interrogate the ways in which an individual’s class position informs and reflects experiences associated with race, gender, and sex, among other embodied identities. Ultimately, we consider the weight or force of class analytics in explaining social and economic inequality in the modern era.
SOC 285 Contemporary Sociological Theory
This course provides a deep analysis of key themes in classical and contemporary social theory. Though partly a survey course covering important figures and theories in the sociological canon—for example, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—the course is foremost concerned with how sociologists frame and understand real world problems. Students learn how social theory and the discipline of sociology, generally, adapts and evolves alongside political, economic, and cultural shifts, domestically and globally.
SOC 390 Advanced Studies in Ethnographic Methods
In this seminar, we learn the craft of ethnography in two primary ways. First, we read current and classic ethnographies, outlining how researchers engage critical questions of everyday life through on the ground observations. Second, we do ethnography—students in this course select a community or group to study in setting they visit regularly, write up fieldnotes, record statements, and interpret empirical findings. Students make regular observations several times a week, and, when possible, participate in these interactions.
SOC 395 Neoliberalism: Ideology, Crisis & Resistance
The term “neoliberalism” is typically associated with initiatives and strategies intended to reorganize the functions of the state in line with corporate interests, and in ways that diminish life chances for poor and working people and increase inequality, overall. But how did this shift in policy preferences come about? Where did it emerge, and why, and with what implications, domestic and global? What is “new” about neoliberalism? How does it differ from what came before? The course sets out to answer these questions with a look into increased competition between industrial powers in the US and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. The course subsequently assess the technological, financial, and communications innovations that followed, and which reverberate to this day. In the class, we seek to connect these innovations and related shifts in the functions of the state and actions of political and economic elites to a series of global economic crises.
SOC 395 Sociology of Elites
In recent years, as the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen within and across nation-states, social scientists have turned to the study of elites and the role they play in generating and extending these extreme inequalities. Even as some defend high concentrations of wealth on the basis of natural right, work ethic, and incentive, an increasing number of scholars, activists, and ordinary citizens alike remain skeptical that current levels of inequality can be held constant without grave consequences to the existing global order. The course engages this broader debate, while helping students to develop the analytical and rhetorical tools necessary to situate this broader phenomenon within world historical events. The following questions guide our inquiry: What social, political, and cultural institutions make today’s elite possible? What attitudes and behaviors ensure the reproduction of elites one generation to the next? How do these institutions and processes impact public confidence and faith in civil society? Finally, what, if anything, might be done to generate a more just and equitable world?