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

Prerequisite: SOAN 101, SOAN 102, POV 101, or LACS 101.
FDR: SS4 Social Science - Group 4 Distribution
Credits: 3

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.