Sociology provides a unique way to look at human behavior and social interaction. Sociology is the systematic study of the groups and societies in which people live. In this introductory course, we analyze how social structures and cultures are created, maintained, and changed, and how they affect the lives of individuals. We will consider what theory and research can tell us about our social world.

Sociology provides a unique way to look at human behavior and social interaction. Sociology is the systematic study of the groups and societies in which people live. In this introductory course, we analyze how social structures and cultures are created, maintained, and changed, and how they affect the lives of individuals. We will consider what theory and research can tell us about our social world.

The term Africana emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of the field, however, are much older,easily reaching back to oral histories and writings during the early days of the Trans-Atlantic African slave trade. The underpinnings of the field continued to grow in the works of enslaved Africans, abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century, and evolved in the twentieth century by black writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document African descended people's lives. Collectively, their work established African Studies as a discipline,epistemological standpoint and political practice dedicated to understanding the multiple trajectories and experiences of black people in the world throughout history. As an ever-transforming field of study, this course will examine the genealogy, major discourses, and future trajectory of Africana Studies. Using primary sources such as maps and letters, as well as literature and performance, our study of Africana will begin with continental Africa, move across the Atlantic during the middle passage and travel from the coasts of Bahia in the 18th century to the streets of Baltimore in the 21st century. The course is constructed around major themes in Black intellectual thought including: retentions and transferal, diaspora, black power, meanings of blackness, uplift and nationalism. While attending to narratives and theories that concern African descended people in the United States, the course is uniquely designed with a focus on gender and provides context for the African diasporic experience in the Caribbean and Latin America.

This freshman seminar examines the homelessness problem from a variety of scientific and policy perspectives. Contemporary homelessness differs significantly from related conditions of destitute poverty during other eras of our nation's history. Advocates, researchers and policymakers have all played key roles in defining the current problem, measuring its prevalence, and designing interventions to reduce it. The first section of this course examines the definitional and measurement issues, and how they affect our understanding of the scale and composition of the problem. Explanations for homelessness have also been varied, and the second part of the course focuses on examining the merits of some of those explanations, and in particular, the role of the affordable housing crisis. The third section of the course focuses on the dynamics of homelessness, combining evidence from ethnographic studies of how people become homeless and experience homelessness, with quantitative research on the patterns of entry and exit from the condition. The final section of the course turns to the approaches taken by policymakers and advocates to address the problem, and considers the efficacy and quandaries associated with various policy strategies. The course concludes by contemplating the future of homelessness research and public policy.

Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio-economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced by the surrounding forces.

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.