SOC 290 - Special Topics in Sociology

Credits: 3 in Fall or Winter, 4 in Spring
Planned Offering: Offered when interest is expressed and departmental resources permit.

A discussion of a series of topics of sociological concern. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.

Topics for Spring 2012:

SOC 290: The Social and The Sacred: Topics In The Sociology Of Morality (4). A brief introduction to the sociology of morality. We begin by exploring key classical and contemporary studies in the sociology of morality to uncover how sociologists have analyzed morality and to critically review their findings. Next, we read a set of interdisciplinary studies that describe the various forms that moral orders and orientations take, as we consider the many moralities of membership that have emerged along racial, class, gender, status, party, and occupational lines. Later, in light of the social constructivists’ idea of the moral panic, we discuss and scrutinize certain profane phenomena that allegedly corrupt character and threaten the moral order. Lastly, we discuss analyses of the sacred – beliefs, spaces, and cultural practices that stand apart from, yet also constitute, everyday life. Sigmon

SOC 290: Telling About Society: The Sociology of Representation and Representations of Society (4). This course explores representations of society from two perspectives. The first part of the course draws on the sociology of culture and the sociology of science to explore how representations of society are created from a sociological perspective. We explore the impact of organizations, audiences, standardization, and critics on the creation of cultural products, culminating in a research project on specific instances of cultural or scientific production from a sociological perspective, through interviews and/or participant observation. The second part examines how society is portrayed in several different forms – self-help books, journalistic accounts, movies, social scientific writing, photography, and plays. Through class discussion, we examine the views of society as presented by various creators in these diverse media, culminating in student presentations on a single work focused on explaining both the view of society that is represented in the work and the social factors that affected its production. Kordsmeier.