SOAN 264 - States, Data, and Population Policies in the Americas

FDR: SS4 Social Science - Group 4 Distribution
Credits: 3

Prerequisite: SOAN 101, SOAN 102, POV 101, or LACS 101. While concentrating on the societies of the Americas, students focus on two of the main domains within which states seek to understand and influence populations: policies governing the collection of information about their residents, such as the census, and those governing migration. The course is made up of two interwoven parts, a traditional seminar portion that examines such policies from the perspective of historical sociology and a data-lab portion in which we perform exploratory visualization of historical and contemporary census and migration data from the region, using the “tidyverse” suite of R packages. We reflect critically on our own work, making use of perspectives afforded by the historical sociology portion of the course.