First-Year Studies: (Re)Constructing the Social: Subject, Field, and Text

Catalog description

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things that we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship of the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. Theatre…