Sociology of the Future

Catalog description

The discipline of sociology emerged out of efforts to understand social transformations like industrialization, the rise of a capitalist economy, and the erosion of local solidarities in favor of impersonal forms of social integration. Today, similar or even greater transformations are arguably afoot, but sociologists are less likely to directly address them. This seminar surveys some domains undergoing dramatic change, or where such change is plausibly on the horizon, with an eye to longer-term developments and their implications for contemporary theory and research. These include demographic shifts such reductions in family size, fluid conceptions of sex and sexuality, trends in violence at the individual and group level, climate change, and revolutions in work and communication technologies. The goal is not to anticipate what will happen (we wish!), but to bring questions about possible trajectories into focus, and to consider what we learn from past attempts at forecasting.