53 courses with the subject SOC, 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.
SOC 113Cultural Anthropology4
An introduction to the ways that anthropologists analyze cultures to understand the diversity of human social forms. Using both cross-cultural comparisons of major social institutions and practices and the intensive examination of selected specific cultures, it seeks to promote students’ understanding of human cultural diversity. (M4) (Intercultural and Linguistic Competencies)(Equity Inclusion)(PTK: GLO) (PTK:SS)
The medical scientific community has been dedicated to mastering illness and disease, fixing whatever we collectively deem wrong with the human body, intervening when the organism is injured or invaded. In the process of fighting disease, we have created numerous physical and pharmaceutical enhancement techniques in the name of beauty, symmetry, mental stability and productivity. We are now at the crossroads of the next frontier-the creation of cyborgs, combined organic and mechanical organisms. Whether we talk about the implantation of computer chips in humans or the substitution of amputated limbs with robotic replacements, we have begun the process of integrating men and machines. In this class we will explore the use of a variety of enhancement procedures-pharmaceutical, genetic and mechanical–and reflect on what the future of human enhancement will mean for our understanding of the human experience.
Explores basic concepts and theories concerning the relationship between individuals and society. Emphasizes the influence of culture, social structure, and institutions upon human activity. Discusses and analyzes social groups, socialization, community, class, power, and social change, among other substantive issues. (M4) (PTK - SS)
An introduction to the field of forensic science as applied to criminal investigations and the law. This course will employ a data-driven approach to solving simulated criminal cases using a variety of scientific methods to examine physical evidence. Evidence-based lab experiments include examinations of soil samples, hair fiber, blood patterns, fingerprints, and ballistics and will be conducted to build a logical case in a criminal investigation. The laboratory will culminate in a final project employing a number of these methods. Limitations and abilities of experimental techniques will also be examined throughout the course. No pre-requisites. (F4)
Kinship (around which ideas of families are structured) is a fundamental and central social institution in all societies and cultures around the world. The course introduces students to cross-cultural variations in how notions of kinship are conceptualized and practiced in structuring various social relationships and models of relatedness within different socio-political, cultural contexts. The course will further explore how approaches to the study of kinship have evolved and remain relevant today, with particular attention to issues of relationship between biology and culture, personhood, identity, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and power.
Students will study, and find and create spaces in which to think and see more freely in order to identify and analyze (in)justice in our own lives, communities, and world. We also will use the contemplative practices of memoir (drawing from the Moravian tradition of Lebenslaufe) and walking as resources for critical thinking. A majority of the course will involve students developing individual responses to (in)justice (“interventions”) through various projects that reflect students’ own passion and design, including academic, artistic, political, religious, social, service-oriented, and personal responses. Students submit a portfolio comprising their best work from the semester to demonstrate that they have met the learning goals of the course, and include their memoir. (M3)
Describes the wide variety of human services offered in the United States, explaining current resources available and ranges of unmet needs. Students explore the historical development of the helping professions, as well as philosophies and political realities that affect human services. They also examine roles and skills needed by various human-service practitioners.
An introduction to the American criminal justice system. Topics include measuring crime, crime causation theories, criminal law, law enforcement, criminal courts, and corrections. Students will explore strategies for system reform to improve the quality of justice in America today.
This course introduces students to the basic principles and concepts of international law within the context of a globalizing world. It aims to familiarize students with the history and framework of the international legal system, highlighting how key legal principles, doctrines, and practices influence and are impacted by political, economic, social, military, technological, and ecological developments in the contemporary global arena. By taking this course, students will have a better understanding of how international law manifests itself in real life and impacts society and individuals in significant, powerful ways.
SOC216 - Crime, Law, Justice Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 220Amer Constitutional Law4
Role of the Supreme Court and its relationship to legislative and executive branches of the American political system. Attention to judicial decisions of constitutional and historic significance in development of American government.
POSC 110 OR SOC 216 Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 221Civil Liberties4
Civil liberties of Americans as delineated in the Bill of Rights. Issues of freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, right to counsel, searches and seizures, self-incrimination, cruel and unusual punishment, and fair trial. Judicial policy-making and problem of individual freedoms in conflict with federal and local police powers.
Legal principles related to conduct of business and industry. Topics include contracts, sales, agency, business organizations, partnerships, corporations, pass-through entities, unfair competition, and cyberlaw.
Tourism and tourist-based activities account for over ten percent of the world GDP today (source: World Tourism Organization). As more people are traveling to different places away from their homes, the level of interaction between hosts and guests has significant implications on the development of new cultural patterns and social practices in guest and host destinations. This course examines the development of tourism within the conceptual framework of anthropology and related social sciences. It encourages students to examine the impact that tourism has upon the cultures and people visited, the nature and relationship of culture to tourism, the recreation and manufacture of heritage for tourists and the performance of cultural acts through orchestrated dance, song and festivals. In the process of understanding the role of tourism and heritage in the development of modern cities and nations, students will survey how spaces are demarcated for tourism consumption, explore the role of marketing and branding of tourist destinations in shaping tourist activities and identify trends in tourism and heritage development. Furthermore, students will analyze complementary and contrasting viewpoints about cultural politics, sustainable social and economic development, and other issues related to the promotion of tourism in different parts of the world, and the challenges that host communities increasingly face in light of the presence of tourists. (M4)
The concept of deviance as addressed by sociological perspectives. Sociological, biological, and psychological theories of causation are used to explore behaviors that may intersect with matters pertaining to criminal justice and social welfare.
Delinquent behavior and the juvenlie justice system, with emphasis on facets of delinquency (types and origins) that differentiate it from adult criminal behavior. Topics include institutional and non-institutional prevention, control, and treatment of delinquency.
Development and practical use of skills for initiating the research process, from development of topics to determination of research methods and instruments. Information-gathering through traditional sources and the media, and proper reporting of this information. Understanding and use of structures for data-gathering. (PTK - SCI)
SOC 115 MILE Requirement: SCI Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 251Human Sexuality4
The physical, psychological, relational, and socio-cultural aspects of sexuality influence humans from before birth through death. This course will increase students’ understandings of lifespan human sexuality; engage them in critical thinking about sexuality in the context of culture; help them identify and critique their sexual values, attitudes and morals; and enable students to make relational and sexual decisions in keeping with their values. (U2)
This course will examine crime as a social construct, a topic of scientific study, and a social problem. Specifically, students in the course will explore what behavior is defined as criminal and how it comes to be considered criminal, what social factors can be used to predict crime rates, how society responds to crime, and what impact crime has on society. (Equity and Inclusion)
SOC 115 Credit Type Code: Letter Grade TAGS Inclusion
SOC 253Intimate Partner Violence4
In this course, students will gain an introduction to the issue of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). They will explore the different perspectives and approaches to this issue from historical, contemporary, and cross-cultural lenses. Students will become familiar with the historical and theoretical frameworks through which we can examine IPV, taking a critical look at this issue from an interpersonal level, a systems level, and a global/cultural level. Additionally, students will examine the available resources and services for survivors of violence and what advocates and providers can do to be attentive to inequalities and gaps in these structures and systems.
SOC 113 OR ANTH 113 OR SOC 115 Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 256Social Controversies4
Ethical concerns associated with traditional and contemporary social issues. Assessment of moral arguments based upon individual beliefs as well as those promoted by traditional philosophy. Encourages exploration of students’ own philosophies in the context of everyday life. (U2)(Ethical Deliberation)
SOC 115 & JUNIOR OR SENIOR CLASS STANDING Credit Type Code: Letter Grade TAGS Ethical Deliberation
SOC 258WI: Power & Conflict4
Analyzes the ways that sociologists and others have tried to understand social hierarchies and the processes by which social activity develops and sustains them. Focus is on understanding social-science theories and concepts that describe and analyze social inequality and perceptions of such inequality in modern life. Writing-intensive.
Examines the city as a unique site of social life, using an historical and comparative approach to indentify key features in the development of industrial, post-industrial, and global cities. Topics include human and spatial divisions, institutional structure of urban areas (including economic, political, and religious dimensions), cosmopolitanism, and pluralism. Each term, the course focuses on one city, such as New York, Bombay, or London, as a case study.
Basic sociological concepts applied to rural societal institutions and rural communities, in addition to causes and consequences of rural social change. Topics include power and conflict, poverty, social change and development, and the family in the context of rural life.
The role of religion in modern society, with emphasis on the changing dynamic of religion. Topics include secularization and de-secularization of society; religious pluralism and immigration; political and civil religion; new religions. (M3)
Historical development and competing philosophies of corrections as institutional and community-based programs. Dynamics of prison life; inmate subculture; administrative, organizational, and rehabilitiative aspects of adult and juvenile probation and parole.
Medical sociology provides an analytical framework for understanding the social contexts of health, illness and health care. Central topics include the subjective experience of health and illness, political, economic and environmental circumstances fostering ill health, and societal forces constraining the medical care system and individuals’ responses to illness. This field draws on traditional sociological issues and contributes to them through reformulations of such basic concepts as social systems and institutions, professionalism, social movements and social change, and social interaction and negotiation. Drawing from pluralistic perspectives, the field is concerned with basic sociological research and its implications for public policy and practice. (https://www.asanet.org/communities/sections/sites/medical-sociology). In this course, you will gain a foundational understanding of this subfield of sociology.
Sources and applications of family law in America. Legal regulation of marriage, boundaries of marital and non-marital contracts, divorce. Legal ramifications of parent-child relationship, including parental obligations in children’s education and medical care. Issues of child neglect, abuse, and legal termination of parental rights.
JUNIOR OR SENIOR CLASS STANDING Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 312Environmental Law4
Importance of public policy and the law to environmental issues and problems. Topics include environmental values upon which policy is based; review of laws and regulations with an emphasis on NEPA, RCRA, CERCLA; and policies that apply to clean water, wetlands, endangered species.
This course will take a critical, sociological perspective to better understand violence in society. Students will examine sociological explanations of violence, as well as how violence is organized in society (that is, how can violence be understood in terms of social structure). Students will also examine specific forms of violence and explore strategies for preventing and responding to violence at the individual and structural levels.
Causes of crime, nature of criminal acts, elements of crimes, defenses, excuses and justifications for crimes. Topics include crimes against persons, property, moral order, “victimless” crimes, admissibility of evidence, constitutional guarantees
Prominent schools of sociological theory, building upon theories introduced in lower-level courses. Development of social theory and connections between classical and contemporary theoretical positions. Topics include consensual and conflict approaches, micro- and macro- perspectives. Current theoretical challenges, including feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-modernist theories.(PTK - L&R)
SOC 115 MILE Requirement: L&R Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 336Criminology: Theories in Practice4
This course will build on students’ foundational knowledge of criminal justice and criminological theory. Students will revisit mainstream and critical theoretical frameworks introduced in previous coursework in order to critically assess the arguments and assumptions of those frameworks, synthesize separate theories into more holistic integrated theories, and use those frameworks to analyze data related to crime rates and crime causation in the United States and abroad. After completing this course, students will have a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the major theories used in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. (PtK:L&R)
This course is designed to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the status of women in society today and its impact on women and girls both as victims and perpetrators of crime. The course examines theories of victimization, crime and delinquency, as well as how the criminal and juvenile justice systems function to process female victims and female offenders. Focusing on females’ specific pathways into crime and delinquency, students will examine contemporary prevention and intervention strategies designed to either prevent such behaviors from happening in the first place or from reoccurring once they have been exhibited.
Capstone course for sociology majors. Each student conducts an empirical study designed to develop skills for gathering and interpreting data using common statistical tests to determine significant effects. Students become familiar with computer programs that perform these tests and practice scholarly presentation of research findings. (WI) (Quantitative Reasoning)(Writing)
SOC 246 MILE Requirement: BTC LinC Requirement: WI Credit Type Code: Letter Grade TAGS Quantitative Reasoning Writing
SOC 347WI: Advanced Research Anthropology4
The course explores the scope of methodologies incorporated within contemporary cultural anthropology. Students will engage in examining epistemological perspectives in the practice of anthropology and work towards acquiring skills for conducting and carrying out various stages of ethnographic fieldwork, from research design, methods of data collection to developing tools of interpretive analysis and presenting their findings across different audiences, within and outside academia. The course will further engage students to contemplate theoretical and ethical frameworks for conceptualizing the value and relevance of anthropological knowledge and methodologies in an increasingly interconnected global society. (Writing)
SOC 113 OR ANTH 113 OR SOC 115 LinC Requirement: WI Credit Type Code: Letter Grade TAGS Writing
SOC 350Socio-History of Media Technology4
Technological development and social implications of various forms of mass media. Analyzes mass media as a social force that shapes personal and collective ideas and behaviors.(U1) (PTK - HUM)
JUNIOR OR SENIOR CLASS STANDING MILE Requirement: HUM Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 351Globalization: The Human Experience in an Interconnected World4
This course focuses upon examining the broad ramifications and the moral reorganization of various aspects of human social life tied to the paradoxes associated with the contemporary period of globalization. Students will explore the variety of ways in which the orientation of globalization today fosters greater degrees of physical, social, and virtual human interconnectedness than ever before, while simultaneously threatening the domination of institutions and ideologies that have framed the modern experience. Students will investigate different areas of life (social and natural) impacted by globalization in pursuit of better understanding their place in an increasingly shifting world and identify ways in which they, as individuals, communities, and humanity as a whole, can thrive in it more sustainably. Through a problem-based approach to globalization, the seminar will encourage students to underline the importance of establishing causation and of specifying causal pathways for understanding the multitude of ways in which converging and diverging processes shape the experience of globalization for people around the world in the 21st century.
SOC 113 OR ANTH 113 OR SOC 115 Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 355WI:Sociology of Gender4
Relationships between biologically defined sex and culturally defined gender; analysis of expectations and limitations upon males and females in traditional and contemporary socieites. Significant focus on inequality in social institutions, including family, workplace, and legal system, that reflect differences in sex and sexual orientation. (Equity and Inclusion)
Current and historical theories of race of ethnicity paradigms. Concepts of minority-dominant relations, assimilation, pluralism, strains of anti-racism, immigration, segregation. (Equity and Inclusion)
A more grounded approach for tracing and interpreting the wide reach of legalized and enforced segregation in American life focusing primarily on the post-bellum period of the 19th century through the Civil Rights Struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Looks past many of the more commonly understood (and misinterpreted) elements of the so-called Jim Crow edifice by looking at all regions of the country during this period in a more comparative frame. Examines the social, historical, economic, and political forces that fueled the construction of segregation then while attempting to make sense of discussions relative to race, class, and power in America today.
In this class, we will explore the structure, function and culture of health care in the US and analyze the divide between what we ideally would like to achieve in a healthcare system (ideologies) and the lived reality of people in that system. We will explore how the structure of the institutions that deliver health care impact the experience of the delivery of care. Students will gain experience collecting information on the healthcare system (both quantitative and qualitative data), organizing that information, and experimenting with different ways to summarize and communicate information to an audience.
SOC 113 OR ANTH 113 OR SOC 115 AND JUNIOR OR SENIOR CLASS STANDING Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 365Bioethics: Sociological Perspective4
Our cultural concept of what defines a “human being,” and what defines both normal and desired life experiences impacts not only the practice of medicine, but also our pursuit of new medical technologies. And once those technologies are created, they may in turn impact our experience and change previous expectations and understandings. The past few decades have brought about a substantial change in the practice of medicine. We have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of people undergoing cosmetic surgical procedures in light of what many social scientists argue is a new age of age discrimination. We have new disease categories such as ADHD which have impacted the experience of childhood in America, so the once “unruly” or “squirmy” child is now medically controlled. Among developed nations, the United States holds the distinction of reporting the largest percent of its adult population on antidepressants. This medical response to stress and sadness is in part a response to the general American perception that sadness impedes productivity. And think about how America’s fascination with both physical and intellectual prowess is leading us closer to genetic engineering. (U2)(PTK:HUM)
SOC 115 or ANTH 113 and junior/senior standing. Credit Type Code: Letter Grade
SOC 370Seminar4
In-depth study of one of a wide range of topics in contemporary sociology, such as social movements, media, sports, and other aspects of popular culture. Open to junior and senior sociology majors or by permission of instructor.
Designed to related classroom concepts to organizational practice. To be eligible for a specific placemetn, students should contact advisor at the start of the junior year to plan courses necessary for their field placement, which requires approval of fieldwork seminar instructor. Restricted to senior majors.
Designed to related classroom concepts to organizational practice. To be eligible for a specific placemetn, students should contact advisor at the start of the junior year to plan courses necessary for their field placement, which requires approval of fieldwork seminar instructor. Restricted to senior majors.
Designed to related classroom concepts to organizational practice. To be eligible for a specific placemetn, students should contact advisor at the start of the junior year to plan courses necessary for their field placement, which requires approval of fieldwork seminar instructor. Restricted to senior majors.
