This class examines the history of urban and suburban housing in the twentieth century US. We will examine the relationship between postwar suburban development as a corollary to the "underdevelopment" of American cities contributing to what scholars have described as the "urban crisis" of the 1960s. Housing choice and location were largely shaped by discriminatory practices in the real estate market, thus, the course explores the consequences of the relationship between public policy and private institutions in shaping the metropolitan area including after the passage of federal anti-housing discrimination legislation in the late 1960s.

Would universal health insurance improve the health of the poor? Do patterns of arrests in US cities show evidence of racial profiling? What accounts for who votes and their choice of candidates? This course will teach students how to address these and other social science questions by analyzing quantitative data. The course introduces basic principles of statistical inference and programming skills for data analysis. The goal is to provide students with the foundation necessary to analyze data in their own research and to become critical consumers of statistical claims made in the news media, in policy reports, and in academic research.

This is the second class of the quantitative methods field sequence in the PhD. in Politics; it is meant to be taken after POL 572. The class covers causal inference and program evaluation methods at a graduate level, as well as advanced topics in statistics such as nonparametric estimation and partial identification.

This course provides a broad overview of the field of population studies. Topics covered include: a survey of past and current trends in the growth of the population, analysis of the components of population change (fertility, mortality, migration) and their determinants, the social and economic consequences of population change (environmental, ageing and the welfare state), racial/ethnic and spatial inequality and population policy. The readings cover issues in industrialized as well as low-income countries, with a focus on the U.S. for several topics.

Introduction to Sociology looks at the social forces--some strikingly obvious, some hidden yet powerful--that shape our lives and the world around us. Our choices as individuals are almost always enmeshed in deeper social structures, such as perceived racial categories, the geography of job opportunities, and who we know and don't know. Sociology gives us diverse conceptual and methodological tools to help us uncover these social structures and understand how they shape our lives. This course introduces some of sociology's best-known tools and insights they've revealed so far.

An introduction to the social bases of American politics and the political forces in the shaping of American society. This year's class will focus on racial, gender, and class divisions in contemporary America.

By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.

This course is an introduction to the logic and practice of social science research. The goal is to provide methodological training that will enable students to design and execute successful independent research projects. We review a range of approaches used by sociologists to answer research questions, including field experiments, surveys, observation, in-depth interviews, and mixed method research.

Most research in sociology is quantitative, and it is important for students to be able to critically evaluate published quantitative research. Ideally, students should also be able to conduct empirical research involving statistical methods. This course provides the foundation for both goals. The course focuses specifically on how to determine, apply, and interpret statistical methods appropriate for answering a sociological research question given a particular set of data. Basic probability theory is introduced as a building block of statistical reasoning, and a variety of commonly-used statistical methods are covered in the course.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? Drawing on history, social-scientific research, and reporting, this seminar will attempt to unravel this question. Weekly, we will discuss a topic central to understanding the causes and consequences of, and solutions to, American poverty. We will take field trips, welcome guests, and collaborate on projects to abolish poverty.

This course explores how race, class, and power shape today's market economy. It draws from economic sociology to unpack how race and class hierarchies define economic lives and structures. It attends explicitly to the construction of money and its role in producing economic and financial inequalities. Class discussions and writing assignments address various topical matters, including housing, credit, banking, the financial services industry, wealth management, and social finance.

Examines the cultures of classes within American society and asks to what extent people's identities, relationships, or chances for social mobility are shaped by their class culture. Looks at high and popular culture as well as mass media, paying attention to patterns of cultural consumption ("taste") and asks how these patterns work to reproduce the class structure.

Does where you live determine your destiny? This seminar will engage students in a rich dialogue about these questions and more, drawing from the best social science evidence to date from the social sciences. In the first half of the course, we will consider research conducted on neighborhood-level (census tract) differences in big cities. In the second half, we will consider research focusing on differences between communities across the entire U.S., including rural America. Student presentations are a significant part of this course.

The course examines the gendered racialization of Asian American women. It identifies and interrogates experiences of everyday violence, looking at their hypersexualization, labor market precarity, intimate partner violence, and poverty. It situates the discussion in the law, family, workplace, and campus community.

Sociology has always been engaged in the study of law and, in this course, we will study law with the tools of sociology. In the first half of the course, we will examine how law makes society, focusing on the way that legal ideas create institutions like courts, citizenship and money; social practices like marriage, criminality, free-lancing and inequality; and even identities like race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality. In the second half, we will consider how people interact with legal institutions, voluntarily to achieve their goals and involuntarily to be disciplined by others. We will use both US and international examples.

Sociology as a discipline was not institutionalized until the early 20th century, but sociological thinking predates the discipline by at least a century. In this course, we examine the development of social thought through the writings of sociology's founders as they developed the idea of the social and its relationship to the development of the individual and to economic and political transformation. While the course lingers on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, it also explores their intellectual contexts, their interlocutors and their legacies up through the middle of the 20th century.

A rigorous first course in regression with applications to social science. Assuming only basic math, the course covers probability, inference from random samples, multiple regression and modern causal inference. Throughout we provide an introduction to programming with the open-source statistical package R and examples from current social science research.

Sociology as a discipline was not institutionalized until the early 20th century, but sociological thinking predates the discipline by at least a century. In this course, we examine the development of social thought through the writings of sociology's founders as they developed the idea of the social and its relationship to the development of the individual and to economic and political transformation. While the course lingers on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, it also explores their intellectual contexts, their interlocutors and their legacies up through the middle of the 20th century.

Preparation of quantitative research papers based on field experiments, laboratory experiments, survey procedures, and secondary analysis of existing data banks.

The focus of the course is recent developments in statistical methods used in human quantitative genetics. We begin with traditional kinship-based approaches and move to molecular genetics approaches. Topics include gene discovery, calculation of heritability of traits using genetic markers, genetic correlation of traits, population stratification, prediction, ancestry, family-based models. Additional, optional modules that we may cover include: methods to detect selection, genes and social networks, the promise and pitfalls of Mendelian randomization, models to detect variance-regulating loci, and gene-by-environment interactions.

Twenty-first century economic sociology is flourishing as a new generation of scholars develops fresh theoretical approaches and makes startling empirical discoveries. In compressed form, this course provides an introduction to the field and its efforts to develop sociological explanations of economic phenomena. In particular, we focus on the place of cultural meanings and social ties in accounting for economic activity. After a general orientation to the field the course explores a wide range of economic activities, including household finances, credit and debt, migrant transactions, payment systems, and consumption.

Artificial intelligence - a cluster of technologies including but not limited to large language models - has inspired hope, hype, horror and greed as corporations rush to grab profits, policymakers grapple with regulation, researchers push boundaries and regular people wonder what it all means. We will examine the interaction between this cluster of technologies and society through a sociological and historical lens and aim to extend the conceptual and empirical lessons from earlier eras of industrial and scientific upheaval which, not at all coincidentally, sparked the founding of sociology.

The Research Apprenticeship involves faculty assignment to students that lead to the acquisition of new research skills by the student and/or may lead to a joint research project during that semester or in the future. This may include quantitative or qualitative research methods and/or a substantive area of research (i.e. a survey of a literature). It is required during each semester of the first two years of graduate study (A,B,C,D). SOC 599A and 599C are offered in the fall and SOC 599B and 599D are offered in the spring.

Analyzes the historical construction of race as a concept in American society, how and why this concept was institutionalized publicly and privately in various arenas of U.S. public life at different historical junctures, and the progress that has been made in dismantling racialized institutions since the civil rights era.

For the first time, most people now live in cities. One in seven humans lives in an urban slum. We analyze the political, economic, and social dynamics that both create and arise from urbanization, informality, and attempts to govern our contemporary urban world. We ask how formal and informal institutions change inequalities of shelter, work, race, and other social identities, across urban space. We investigate the links between the processes of urbanization and climate change, and how they shape the politics of cities. We draw from cases across the globe and the US, along with a range of social science methods and theoretical perspectives.

This course focuses on the causes, consequences, and responses to urban inequality. The course is organized in four parts. First, we consider how one comes to learn about and understand cities and neighborhoods. Second, we review classic and current ideas about how urbanization affects the way we live and interact with each other. Third, we assess various explanations for urban inequality. Fourth, we focus our attention on central problems and challenges of urban life, from segregation to violence, and consider policy responses.

Course aims to improve students' abilities to understand and critically evaluate public opinion polls and surveys, particularly as they are used to influence public policy. Course begins with an overview of contrasting perspectives on the role of public opinion in politics, then examines the evolution of public opinion polling in the US and other countries. Class visits a major polling operation to get a firsthand look at procedures used for designing representative samples and conducting surveys by telephone, mail and Internet.

This seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits will situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS will allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.