8 courses with the subject SOCI, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
SOCI 2114Cultural Connections to Fashion3
Arts & Sciences “Fashion is not an island; it’s a response!” In Cultural Connections to Fashion, students will journey through the first half of the 20thcentury,taking an in-depth look at the socioeconomic and political landscapes that made fashion happen the way that it did and making connections between what was happening in the world, how it impacted what people wore, and how these past fashion trends and cultural moments continue to influence fashion today. credit(s): 3
Arts & Sciences In this course, students will learn about how the fashion industry has come to face enormous disruption to be inclusive of all consumers, forcing the industry to address its decades-long practices of exclusion. The fashion industry has a long history of discrimination against a range of groups both in the products and marketing they develop as well as their organizational policies and personnel. The industry has struggled to keep up with diverse markets and in return has suffered from decreased customer loyalty, increased lawsuits, and damaged reputations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, students will critically analyze fashion history, current fashion business practices, as well as what messages fashion creates and how it is positioned in popular culture, the media, and society. credit(s): 3
SOCI 2217Critical Theories of Fashion and Culture3
Arts & Sciences This class encourages students to use critical theoretical frameworks to think about fashion. The class examines fashion as not just a commercial industry, but as what the Frankfurt School of critics called the Culture Industry: a cultural, social, and political phenomenon that can be analyzed, systematized, and interpreted. Specifically, the class explores fashion’s unique role in questions of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality. The class will seek to understand the ways fashion creates meaning for and about individuals based on these concerns. Ultimately the class is dedicated to achieving a fluency in the cultural studies movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to understand fashion consumption and mediation. credit(s): 3
Arts & Sciences This course reviews and challenges contemporary and historical ideas of sexuality and gender, and it serves as an introduction to queer theory and practice. Students will examine identities as practices, constructions, and deeply-felt forms of subjecthood that are culturally and historically specific. Through close reading and critical analysis of core theoretical texts, literature, art, film, comics, and other media, students will build a foundational knowledge of queer history, queer activism, and queer lived experiences. credit(s): 3
Arts & Sciences Women’s Studies introduces intersectional feminist theory, focusing on women and other gendered bodies across lines of class, race, and sexuality. The materials in this course, beginning with black feminist scholarship, expose sexism at the individual, structural, and political level to give students a better understanding of gender and power relations in the United States. By asking critical questions about theory, we will uncover how theory transforms into day-to-day feminist practice. credit(s): 3
SOCI 2416Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice in the U.S.3
Arts & Sciences This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity in the United States. The course problematizes master narratives of U.S. history via an intersectional study of racial discrimination, immigration, economics, labor, political conditions, cultural expression and resistance, social justice movements, racial and ethnic identity, and gender and sexuality. Instruction is based on a variety of media, including spoken word, popular music, and film, and takes a comparative approach that addresses African American, Arab American, Asian American, Chicanx/Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander American groups. credit(s): 3
SOCI 2541Gender Reveal: Connections Between Fashion and Gender3
Arts & Sciences Clothes are public and intimate declarations of our identities. Perhaps most profoundly, clothes tell the story of our gender. By paying attention to the ways culture worships hyperfemininity (as performed by, say, Kim Kardashian) and hypermasculinity (The Rock) while beginning to embrace nonbinary identities and/or aesthetics (Janelle Monae, Sam Smith), this class will explore how clothes uphold or transgress gender and why. Beginning in Persia in the late fifteenth century and drawing from various cultures and points in history, this class covers how fashion and the expression of gender have been affected by laws, culture, trade, marketing, and more. credit(s): 3
SOCI 3113Studies in Masculinity: Tensions and Contentions3
Arts & Sciences This course aims to affirm feminist discourses while developing a language on men and masculinities. We will study various relevant topics such as the current definitions of feminism and masculinities, the possibility of a masculinity crisis, sex and sexuality, gendered work relationships, and the meaning of family and parenthood. By examining the values and practices that shape the relationships between women and men, we will attempt to convert the language of gender conflict into a cooperative discourse where gender is rooted inequality and cooperation rather than power and domination. credit(s): 3
