Fall / Spring Course Offerings
Emory Sociology provides an extensive curriculum for our graduate students. Below are the topical courses and individualized programs offered in recent semesters.
Spring 2024
Tuesdays / Thursdays 8:30am-9:45am
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
With attention to the debates over social science methodologies, the course takes a practical, "hands-on" approach to research methods. With the assistance of the instructor, your advisor, and your peers, you will identify a research question that could develop into a viable second year paper. Through staged assignments throughout the semester, you will design a study to answer your research question, execute the study by collecting pilot data or downloading secondary data, and analyze your results. You will present these results in an empirical paper at the end of the semester. As a requirement for our class, you must become certified in research with human subjects by taking the on-line CITI course. (You can use a valid CITI certificate from another institution).
Wednesdays 2:30pm-5:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course builds upon the statistical toolkit from SOC 500 Linear Regressions and provides a foundation for conducting and evaluating regression-based works in the social sciences. The first part of the course will cover the topics in conducting transparent and reproducible research. Students will be expected to adopt these research practices throughout the semester. The second part of the course will cover generalized linear models (GLM) that examine non-linear outcome variables. The readings, lectures, and in-class discussion will address each method's mathematical justification, execution, and interpretation using statistical software and application in published articles. The third component of the course will focus on students' in-class presentation and discussion of their research projects. The primary goal of this course is for students to gain fluency in the foundational statistical methods in the social sciences. Fluency denotes the ability to 1) to assess the methods' appropriateness to address sociological questions, 2) to provide thoughtful reviews to works using these methods, and 3) to actively engage in collaborations that use statistical methods. This course aims to provide a broad survey of the most commonly used generalized linear models.
Monday/Wednesday 1:00pm-2:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 106
Course Description:
The course deals with new tools of data analysis and visualization, especially for text data (Natural Language Processing, NLP). It is a very demanding 4-credits course, fulfilling the writing requirement since it requires extensive weekly writing.
The course relies on the Stanford parser CoreNLP as the main NLP engine, but a number of other NLP tools will also be used: topic modeling with Mallet and Stanford Topic Modeling Toolbox, Word2Vec, vectors representations of words, shown to capture many linguistic regularities of a corpus, N-grams and word co-occurrences viewers, sentiment analysis. Through these tools, the course will show how to analyze small/large corpora of text. While we have a series of tools (in Java and Python) that can be run from command line, students would greatly benefit to use the freeware software PC-ACE. The software runs under Windows only. Mac users will have to install Windows and MS ACCESS (both free for Emory students) on their machines via Virtualbox (free for Emory students).
The course will also show how to use different tools of data visualization, especially network graphs dealing with relationships between objects (social actors, concepts, or just words), both static and dynamic (changing with time), and spatial maps dealing with objects in space (and time, dynamic maps) through Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. We will focus on freeware software, from Gephi to Cytoscape, Palladio, Google Earth Pro, QGIS, Carto, TimeMapper.
Students are required to come to the class with a corpus of textual data (e,g,, newspaper articles, books, blogs, websites) that they wish to analyze.
Thursday 4:00pm-6:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
The course (1) provides students with grounding in media sociology and (2) prepares students for doing their own media research. To do so, we touch upon the following themes: (a) We examine how various media industries are organized and how such organization is sometimes transformed by regulation, competition, and/or technology. This examination includes both "old" (e.g., film) and "new" media (e.g., social media, streaming video on demand). (b) We focus on the careers of workers within media industries, connecting the constraints of their work environments to the type of content the produce. (c) We inspect media content and investigate factors that promote stability, change, and diversity--including online content. (c) We address the consumers of mass media products and inspect how they utilize and are shaped by media content, as well as how they are also sometimes the producers of content. This course is thus crucial.
Monday 1:00pm-3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
The loss of an important figure at a particular time can completely alter one¿s future trajectory. This course investigates the socioeconomic and health impacts of losing a loved one and the pathways individuals are set on after loss. Elevated rates of mortality experienced by Black families and communities consequently lead to mass bereavement. These deaths not only immediately disrupt lives as individuals wade through grief and mourning but can set off a ripple of cascading consequences in the lives of the bereaved. In this course, we will examine the ripple or "spillover" effects of Black-White disparities in mortality by considering intergenerational consequences of deaths for survivors' health and socioeconomic wellbeing.
Tuesday 2:30pm-5:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
Topic: Historical and Archival Methods
This course will review a suite of methods available to scholars engaged in historical and archival research; particularly in research that focuses on histories that are not centered in the metanarrative frame, underrepresented in the institutional archive, or simply hidden in plain sight. Substantively, we will focus on five modes of inquiry: (1) traditional archival methods, (2) legal history, (3) oral history methodology, (4) digital archives, (5) postcolonial and global historical sociology. Throughout the semester, we will collectively interrogate these approaches through a holistic approach to social scientific inquiry; namely through a lens of theory, praxis, and ethics. To that end, the course will be comprised of deep discussion of texts centered on questions of the theory of history, site visits to archives and research centers, guest lecturers, close readings of contemporary empirical research that employ these methods, and participatory reflection on your own research projects.
Who Should Take This Course: Ideal for students currently in the research or research-design phase of their projects who aim to integrate historical, archival, or oral history methods into their work.
Practicum & Off-Site Travel: This class includes visits to archives, where you'll gain practical skills in historical research methods. Be prepared for off-site travel and fieldwork, as we delve into the nitty-gritty of archival sleuthing.
Holistic Approach: Our discussions will be anchored in theory, praxis, and ethics, as we critically examine each approach. Expect robust dialogues about the theory of history, augmented by guest lectures, site visits, and participatory reflections on your own research endeavors.
Course Goals:
1. Critical Discourse: To build a community engaged in deep intellectual discussions about the production of knowledge, critical methodologies, and research design.
2. Reflexive Praxis: To guide you in understanding how these methods can be applied to your own research, fostering a self-reflective research practice.
3. Effective Communication: To elevate your skills in articulating complex research designs to a diverse scholarly audience.
4. Rigorous Research: To impart the 'how-tos' of meticulous historical research, a facet often overlooked yet foundational to our academic endeavors.
Research Design Focus: Significant time will be dedicated to research design¿addressing the pivotal question: how do you plan to analyze your object of study?
Thursday 1:00pm-3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course is designed to provide a broad overview of racism and its relationship with ethnoracial (racial and ethnic) health disparities. Despite medical advances over the past century, ethnoracial disparities persist. Black, indigenous, Latinx, and people of color in the United States carry an inequitable burden of chronic disease and have higher mortality rates compared to their white counterparts. Since the publication of the Institute of Medicine's report, Unequal Treatment (2003), eliminating health disparities has become a fixture on the "front-burner" of America's health policy agenda. The persistence of ethnoracial health disparities is concerning as Census projections indicate that Whites will become the demographic minority before mid-century, with Latinx, Asian, and Black populations leading the change in population growth. The resistance of ethnoracial health inequities to current health policy solutions, thus, poses non-ignorable social problems that threaten the economic vitality of our nation and contribute to the propagation of social stratification. As the United States continues to diversify and stratify, it will become increasingly important that we, as a nation, begin to address racial and ethnic inequities in health systematically. This course not only speaks to these underlying conditions and nuances, but also provides tools and mechanisms to consider interdisciplinary responses to mitigating ethnoracial inequities in health and healthcare outcomes.
This course deliberately considers the potential of sociological and social science frameworks to changing the current narratives and interventions about racism as a sociopolitical determinant of health.
Wednesday 4:00pm-6:45pm
New Psych Building 220
Course Description:
Research seminar on sociological aspects of Apollo space era (1961-1972). Students will be "doing sociology" through original research on a social or cultural aspect of "Spaceflight," "Astronaut," or "Astronaut Family," using primary source material from the Stuart A. Rose Library as well as other digital archival material (from data collected by Professor Scott).
Only 12 humans have walked on the Moon; only 24 have orbited the Moon. No human has been beyond Earth's orbit since the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972. The Apollo missions were extraordinary scientific achievements; they were also historical events located in particular social contexts. While much research has been done on the scientific, technological, and political aspects of the Apollo era (1961-1972), far less has been done the social and cultural aspects of the space program during this time, particularly on the cultural roots of the astronaut occupation, as well as on the astronaut wives and families, their connections to NASA, and their relationships with the media - all integral to the success of the space program.
Students will "do sociology" by developing their own archival research project focused on illuminating a sociological aspect of the Moonshot era. We will be concerned with practical issues that arise at different stages of the research process, reviewing empirical studies that employ archival and qualitative methods. Assignments will focus on gaining research experience by conceptualizing a research question, articulating the methodological rationale to answer the question, choosing the appropriate archival data, and analyzing a sample of that data.
Particulars: Students will be required to meet individually with Professor Scott to discuss their projects. Required coursework will be 3 short assignments and one final research project. Because this research will be exploratory, there will be different options for the final project, for example: a research presentation; a research proposal; an op-ed essay (public scholarship).
Specifically, the archival sources available for projects are:
· The Anne Lurton Scott and David R. Scott Papers at Emory¿s Stuart A. Rose MARBL (David R. Scott was in Astronaut Group 3, and flew on Gemini 8, Apollo 9, and Apollo 15. Anne Lurton Scott was his wife during this era.)
· Digital selections from LIFE magazine reporter Dora Jane Hamblin¿s Papers at the University of Iowa. (Hamblin was the main journalist assigned to cover the astronaut families for LIFE.)
· Digital selections from LIFE Editorial Records from the New York Historical Society. (LIFE magazine had an exclusive contract for the "personal stories" of the first groups of astronauts.)
· Digital selections from Tom Wolfe's Papers at the New York Public Library. (Wolfe did extensive interviews and research for his book, "The Right Stuff" and his earlier Rolling Stone articles on the early astronauts.)
Wednesday 1:00pm- 3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
The primary goal of this seminar is to facilitate the completion of the second-year research paper requirement. Towards that end, the seminar instructs students regarding conceptual and pragmatic issues associated with empirical research. Assignments pertaining to students' own empirical research projects will complement dialogue about such issues to ensure progress on students' projects.
These offer credit for individualized work with a given faculty member.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
These offer credit for ongoing research overseen by a given faculty member.
These offer credit for participation in assistantships (TATT 605C) and for teaching one's own class (TATT 610SOC).
Read more about these credits here.
Monday 6:00pm-8:45am
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
TThis course is organized as a practical workshop. Class sessions will involve a combination of hands-on activities, discussions, guest presentations and practice teaching sessions. We will approach teaching as a collective endeavor; students will be responsible for: leading discussion of the readings and topics; providing feedback on each other's course materials; preparing for each other's practice-teaching session and sharing information and experiences about teaching. Throughout the course, we will cultivate our individual pedagogical approaches and modes of teaching, linking these themes to practical nuts and bolts of teaching. Flexibility is built into the syllabus; we may adapt the syllabus to accommodate your specific interests, needs and goals as they emerge. By the end of the class, you will have created a syllabus and supporting materials (assignments, exams, projects, etc.) for an undergraduate sociology course.
Fall 2023
Tuesday / Thursday 8:30am-9:45 am
Tarbutton Hall 313
Course Description:
This course will provide a graduate-level introduction to statistics and their use in the sociology. Students will learn how to
(1) identify the appropriate uses of specific statistics (what the statistic is and when to use it)
(2) demonstrate an understanding of the fundamentals of hypothesis testing
(3) describe the shape of probability distributions
(4) use statistical software (Stata) to analyze social science data and meaningfully interpret the results in answer to a research question
(5) interpret statistics from course examples, Stata output, and published studies
By the end of this course students will have the skills and confidence to conduct and interpret statistical analyses and will be prepared for the Spring regression course.
Monday / Wednesday 11:30am-12:45 pm
Tarbutton Hall 106
Course Description:
Network analysis shifts the research focus from individual units to their connections and so brings both theoretical and methodological innovations. Interest in network analysis has EXPLODED in the past few years, due to new advancements in statistical modeling and the rapid availability of network data. This course covers the major methods to collect, represent, and analyze network data. Selected topics include centrality analysis, positional analysis, clustering analysis, the exponential random graph model for modeling network formations, the stochastic actor-oriented model for dynamic network analysis, meta network analysis, weighted network analysis, text network analysis, causal analysis of network effects, and social network-based predictions and interventions. Examples are drawn from a wide range of disciplines. Students will learn hands-on skills to conduct their own research by using R packages. This course requires a basic knowledge of logistic regression and basic programming skills in R.
Monday / Wednesday 1:00pm-2:15 pm
Tarbutton Hall 105
Course Description:
The course deals with new tools of data analysis and visualization, especially for text data (Natural Language Processing, NLP). It is a very demanding 4-credits course, fulfilling the writing requirement since it requires extensive weekly writing. The course does NOT require any prerequisites or prior knowledge of computational tools. The only requirement is that students come to the class with a corpus of data as txt formatted files (e,g, newspaper articles, books, blogs, websites) that they wish to analyze.
The course is based on a set of specialized NLP tools, written in Java and Python, designed for the analysis of small/large corpora of text.The tools are all wrapped in Python with a convenient Graphical User Interface (GUI) to make things easy for the non expert.
The course relies on the Stanford parser CoreNLP as the main NLP engine(with the option of running co-reference resolution), but a number of other NLP tools will also be usedto investigate the CoNLL table created by the CoreNLP parser for specific relationships between specific words, verb and noun density, “function” words, and automatic extraction of SVOs (Subject, Verb, Objects). Two specific tools for passive/active verb forms and nominalization allow to focus on the “denial of agency” at the linguistic level. Other tools focus on the sentiment and language concreteness of a text. The two tools of N-grams and word co-occurrences viewers mimic the behavior of Google N-Grams Viewer but with a personal corpus. Topic modeling, via Mallet or Gensim, allows users to find the main topics in a large set of documents. Word2Vec (via Gensim), a vector representation of words, can help capture the semantic regularities of a corpus.
The course also embeds easy tools of data visualization for a variety of Excel-type charts, network graphs, and Geographic Information System (GIS) maps. The course focuses on freeware software, from Gephi to Cytoscape, Palladio, Google Earth Pro, QGIS, Carto, TimeMapper.
Tuesday 10:00am-12:45 pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course will provide master’s and doctoral level students with an interdisciplinary survey of research and writing on the public health implications of religious practices, beliefs, and institutions. The course will emphasize evidence from quantitative social science and epidemiology and the role of religion in the historical development of public health institutions to identify religion’s role as a social determinant of health.
Required text:
Ellen Idler, Editor. Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health. Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780199362219
Monday 1:00pm-3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This workshop focuses on teaching graduate students how to produce research, ranging from the initial design of a study to eventual submission for publication. The following types of graduate students will be eligible for participation in the workshop: (a) those who specialize in culture and/or social psychology; and (b) those who are currently involved in some stage of the research process (e.g., beginning a project, revising a paper, conducting data analysis, working on a dissertation proposal). Throughout the semester, we will address the particular efforts of each student. Each workshop member will provide constructive comments at our meetings.
Wednesday 6:00pm-8:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 111
Course Description:
The seminar is a sequel to Soc/Ling/QTM 446W and Soc 585 (Big/Small Data & Visualization). It aims to bring to a co-authored journal submission the work carried out by students in 446W/585 on different text corpora. Using a range of NLP tools, students will strive to provide a coherent picture of NLP analytics as these apply to their specific corpus.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
These offer credit for ongoing research overseen by a given faculty member.
These offer credit for individualized work with a given faculty member.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
These offer credit for participation in assistantships (TATT 605C) and for teaching one's own class (TATT 610SOC).
Read more about these credits here.
Spring 2023
Wednesday 2:30pm-5:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course builds upon the statistical toolkit from SOC 500 Linear Regressions and provides a foundation for conducting and evaluating regression-based works in the social sciences. The first part of the course will cover the topics in conducting transparent and reproducible research. Students will be expected to adopt these research practices throughout the semester. The second part of the course will cover generalized linear models (GLM) that examine non-linear outcome variables. The readings, lectures, and in-class discussion will address each method's mathematical justification, execution, and interpretation using statistical software and application in published articles. The third component of the course will focus on students' in-class presentations and discussions of their research projects.
This course's primary goal is for students to gain fluency in the foundational statistical methods in the social sciences. Fluency denotes the ability to 1) assess the methods' appropriateness to address sociological questions, 2) provide thoughtful reviews to works using these methods, and 3) actively engage in collaborations that use statistical methods. This course aims to provide a broad survey of the most commonly used generalized linear models rather than expert knowledge in any particular approach; each topic is worthy of its own semester-long course.
The success of this course depends critically on active participation. As such, students will be evaluated on their intellectual engagement during class discussions and presentations. Please complete the assigned readings before class. This course also requires students to complete an extended abstract or a preliminary analysis of an empirical paper. The final project will be evaluated on its transparency and reproducibility rather than its methodological sophistication. Stage assignments throughout the semester will allow for opportunities for feedback and revision.
Lastly, the primary focus of this course is not statistical programming. I do not expect you to memorize the commands and options for all the statistical methods that we will cover in this course. Instead, I expect you to understand the theory and assumptions behind the methods so that you will be able to figure out the programming part in the future. We will still heavily rely on software for analysis and documentation throughout the course. I will provide support for Stata and R.
Learning Objectives
- Gain fluency in the application of generalized linear models in social science research
- Adopt practices for transparent and reproducible research
- Practice thoughtful feedback and collaboration in a working group setting
- Complete an extended abstract of an empirical article
Required textbook and readings
ISBN: 9780520296954 Christensen, G., J. Freese and E. Miguel.2019. Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science: University of California Press.
ISBN: 9780520289291 Hoffmann, J.P. 2016. Regression Models for Categorical, Count, and Related Variables: An Applied Approach: University of California Press.
ISBN: 978-0761916727 Allison, P. D. 2002. Missing data. SAGE Publications, Inc.
Monday/Wednesday 1:00pm-2:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 106
Course Description:
The course deals with new tools of data analysis and visualization, especially for text data (Natural Language Processing, NLP). It is a very demanding 4-credits course, fulfilling the writing requirement since it requires extensive weekly writing.
The course relies on the Stanford parser CoreNLP as the main NLP engine, but a number of other NLP tools will also be used: topic modeling with Mallet and Stanford Topic Modeling Toolbox, Word2Vec, vectors representations of words, shown to capture many linguistic regularities of a corpus, N-grams and word co-occurrences viewers, sentiment analysis. Through these tools, the course will show how to analyze small/large corpora of text. While we have a series of tools (in Java and Python) that can be run from command line, students would greatly benefit to use the freeware software PC-ACE. The software runs under Windows only. Mac users will have to install Windows and MS ACCESS (both free for Emory students) on their machines via Virtualbox (free for Emory students).
The course will also show how to use different tools of data visualization, especially network graphs dealing with relationships between objects (social actors, concepts, or just words), both static and dynamic (changing with time), and spatial maps dealing with objects in space (and time, dynamic maps) through Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. We will focus on freeware software, from Gephi to Cytoscape, Palladio, Google Earth Pro, QGIS, Carto, TimeMapper.
Students are required to come to the class with a corpus of textual data (e,g,, newspaper articles, books, blogs, websites) that they wish to analyze.
Tuesday 1:00pm-3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This workshop focuses on teaching sociology grad students how to produce research, ranging from the initial design of a study to eventual submission for publication. The following types of sociology graduate students will be eligible for participation in the workshop: (a) those who specialize in culture and/or social psychology; and (b) those who are currently involved in some stage of the research process beyond the second-year paper requirement (e.g., beginning a project, revising a paper, submitting a grant proposal, conducting data analysis, working on a dissertation proposal). Throughout the semester, we will address the particular efforts of each student. Each workshop member will provide constructive comments at our meetings.
Thursday 2:30pm-5:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This is a graduate level theory course designed to examine the social, institutional, political,
cultural and ideological contents of modernity, and its discontents. We will approach our inquiry
through the intellectual framework of racial colonial capitalism.
My learning objectives for you in this course are four-fold. I want you to:
- further develop a disciplined practice of close reading—a practice that is crucial to the work of a social theorist,
- enhance your level of theoretical sophistication (which comes from being well read in your field, and others),
- put into practice the art of asking beautiful questions (don’t you just abhor those
long non-question questions that folks ask at conferences? Me too! Asking profound, thought provoking, expansive-yet-concise questions actually comes from intentioned practice), and to - walk away with a more historically-based and nuanced understanding about race, racism and processes of racialization.
Tuesday 4:00pm-6:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
In this course we investigate the question, “What is the relationship between technology and inequality?” We do so in three ways. First, we explore debates among sociologists, economists, and communication scholars about the extent to which technological change has contributed to various forms of inequality (e.g., education, wealth, health) and how this intersects with inequalities by race, class, and gender. Second, we explore theoretical tools and vocabulary, including what scholars call the first-, second-, and third-level digital divides. First-level divides concern issues of access to technological resources. Second-level divides focus on differences in technological skills and literacies. Third level divides emphasize the relationship between skills and literacies and broader social inequalities. We examine scholarship on each of these divides, what it shows about the relationship between technological change and inequality, and also investigate critical issues beyond the framework of the digital divide, like algorithmic bias. As we investigate these topics, we will attend to the theoretical, substantive, methodological, and political considerations that concern the study of digital inequality. Finally, students will engage in research in digital inequality: manuscript review and a course project (e.g., an individual or collaborative research paper on an ongoing project, a proposal for future research, or a public sociology project, depending on what would best support students’ future work).
Books
ISBN: 978-0226732695 Puckett, Cassidy. Redefining Geek. University of Chicago Press
First edition
Tuesday 1:00pm- 3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
The primary goal of this seminar is to facilitate the completion of the second-year research paper requirement. Towards that end, the seminar instructs students regarding conceptual and pragmatic issues associated with empirical research. Assignments pertaining to students' own empirical research projects will complement dialogue about such issues to ensure progress on students' projects.
These offer credit for individualized work with a given faculty member.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
These offer credit for ongoing research overseen by a given faculty member.
These offer credit for participation in assistantships (TATT 605C) and for teaching one's own class (TATT 610SOC).
Read more about these credits here.
Monday 6:00pm-8:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course discusses "theorizing"--how to think theoretically and how to come up with good theoretical ideas. It includes a review of major epistemologies in social science and a step-by-step practice of theorizing.
Books:
ISBN: 978-0333774991 Benton, Ted, and Ian Craib. 2011. Philosophy of Social Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN: 978-0335208845 Gerard Delanty, Piet Strydom. Philosophies of Social Science: The Classic and Contemporary Readings. Open University Press.
ISBN: 978-691155227 Swedberg, Richard. 2014. The Art of Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
ISBN: 978-0393978148 Abbott, Andrew Delano. 2004. Methods of discovery: heuristics for the social sciences, Contemporary societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Wednesday 8:30am- 11:15am
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course is organized as a practical workshop. Class sessions will involve a combination of hands-on activities, discussions, guest “presentations” and practice teaching sessions. We will approach teaching as a collective endeavor; students will be responsible for: leading discussion of the readings and topics; providing feedback on each other’s course materials; preparing for each other’s practice-teaching session and sharing information and experiences about teaching. Throughout the course, we will cultivate our individual pedagogical approaches and modes of teaching, linking these themes to practical nuts and bolts of teaching. Flexibility is built into the syllabus—we may adapt the syllabus to accommodate your specific interests, needs and goals as they emerge. By the end of the class, you will have created a syllabus and supporting materials (assignments, exams, projects, etc.) for an undergraduate sociology course.
Fall 2022
Tuesday/Thursday 8:30am-9:45am
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics for bivariate and multivariate analyses. The course will help you understand statistics reported in social science publications and in the news media, as well as help you conduct original research. The overall goal is to increase your statistical literacy - your ability to create, interpret, and critically evaluate statistical evidence. This is a set of skills that you will find highly useful in your current academic life and in your future career. It is also a valuable set of skills for virtually everyone in modern society, as statistical knowledge (and numerical literacy more broadly) is key for making sense of the growing amounts of information that we encounter in a digital world.
Wednesday 4:00pm-6:45pm
Tabutton Hall 206
Course Description:
The aim of this course is to teach the fundamentals of research design and the techniques of data collection used in sociological research. By the end of the course, students should be able to: 1) design and execute their own research projects and 2} understand, analyze and critique empirical studies in the sociological literature. With attention to the debates over social science methodologies, the course takes a practical, "hands-on" approach to research methods. As a class, we will construct a study to assess the TATTO program for the Laney Graduate School. Through in-class exercises and assignments, we will collect and analyze the data and produce a report for the Laney Graduate School. Students in the course will also be required to design and implement their own study. Regular assignments throughout the semester will assist you in following the steps of the research process for your own research so that you can produce an empirical paper at the end of the semester. You will also be required to become certified in human subject’s research at Emory by taking the on-line CITI course.
Required Texts:
1) ISBN: 9780534528614 Analyzing Social Settings, Lofland, Lofland and Snow. 4th Edition. (Wadsworth)
2) ISBN: 9780226891286 The Total Survey Error Approach, Herbert Weisberg. (University of Chicago)
Monday/Wednesday 11:30am-12:45pm
Atwood Chemistry Building 316
Course Description:
Network analysis shifts the research focus from individual units to their connections and so brings both theoretical and methodological innovations. Interest in network analysis has EXPLODED in the past few years, due to new advancements in statistical modeling and the rapid availability of network data. This course covers the major methods to collect, represent, and analyze network data. Selected topics include centrality analysis, positional analysis, clustering analysis, the exponential random graph model for modeling network formations, the stochastic actor-oriented model for dynamic network analysis, meta network analysis, weighted network analysis, text network analysis, causal analysis of network effects, and social network-based predictions and interventions. Examples are drawn from a wide range of disciplines. Students will learn hands-on skills to conduct their own research by using R packages. This course requires a basic knowledge of logistic regression and basic programming skills in R.
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00pm-2:15pm
Calloway Center C101
Course Description:
The course deals with new tools of data analysis and visualization, especially for text data (Natural Language Processing, NLP). It is a very demanding 4-credits course, fulfilling the writing requirement since it requires extensive weekly writing.
The course relies on the Stanford parser CoreNLP as the main NLP engine, but a number of other NLP tools will also be used: topic modeling with Mallet and Stanford Topic Modeling Toolbox, Word2Vec, vectors representations of words, shown to capture many linguistic regularities of a corpus, N-grams and word co-occurrences viewers, sentiment analysis. Through these tools, the course will show how to analyze small/large corpora of text. While we have a series of tools (in Java and Python) that can be run from command line, students would greatly benefit to use the freeware software PC-ACE. The software runs under Windows only. Mac users will have to install Windows and MS ACCESS (both free for Emory students) on their machines via Virtualbox (free for Emory students).
The course will also show how to use different tools of data visualization, especially network graphs dealing with relationships between objects (social actors, concepts, or just words), both static and dynamic (changing with time), and spatial maps dealing with objects in space (and time, dynamic maps) through Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. We will focus on freeware software, from Gephi to Cytoscape, Palladio, Google Earth Pro, QGIS, Carto, TimeMapper.
Students are required to come to the class with a corpus of textual data (e,g,, newspaper articles, books, blogs, websites) that they wish to analyze.
Tuesday 1:00pm-3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course will provide graduate students with a survey of research on the social origins of the health, illness, and health care of individuals and populations. Students will be introduced to the process of formulating important social research questions in health and illness, including attention to major theoretical perspectives, measurement of concepts, the merits of various study designs, and both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis.
Wednesday 1:00pm-3:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course approaches the dynamics of social interaction from the symbolic interactionist (SI) perspective. We examine and discuss an overview of both classic and contemporary works in this tradition. In the first section of the course, we will focus on the development of the SI perspective and will read major early theorists including Mead, Du Bois, Cooley, Blumer, Stryker, and Goffman. In the second section of the course we will cover recent theoretical developments, focusing on topics including role taking processes, the looking-glass self, reflected appraisals, identity formation and negotiation processes, stigmatized identities and stress, and identities online. Throughout the course, we will focus on how selves and identities are created, modified, and enacted through interactions with others.
This course will:
- Increase students: understanding of how sociological theories are developed, tested, and refined, and to apply a symbolic interactionist theory to a substantive area of their interest.
- Deepen students: knowledge of sociological research methods through engaging with identity studies that draw on a wide range of methodological approaches.
- Improve students: written and oral communication skills through discussions and writing assignments.
Tuesday 4:00pm-6:45pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
Sociological consideration of the arts has a long history. It extends back to the works of such classic scholars as Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois and has burgeoned greatly in recent times. In studying realms of creativity, such scholars have connected the arts to key concerns in sociological theory, such as commodification, inequality, legitimation, and racialized hierarchies, while also drawing upon a host of cutting-edge methodologies. Put another way, this seminar on a specialized topic also ties directly to the core of sociology.
We will seek a purchase on this sociological work by discussing classic works in class and by reading contemporary works addressing themes that currently enliven the sociology of the arts. We will explore such topics as artistic careers, fields of artistic production, aesthetic boundaries, the audiences for artistic works, and the import and impact of critics. Besides providing students with grounding in the sociology of the arts, this seminar will also prepare them for doing their own research in this area of scholarship, as well as in sociology more broadly. In particular, we will give special attention to methods and designs employed in current research. Thus, by the end of the semester, all will have a grasp of the field and an understanding of how to conduct their own research.
All readings will be available on the class Canvas site.
Thursday 2:30pm-5:15pm
Tarbutton Hall 206
Course Description:
This course is an overview of the sociological approaches to the topic of “intersectionality.” We explore the differences and debates in the sociological literature, as scholars address key questions regarding intersectionality perspectives, including, “What is intersectionality?” “How should we define key dimensions of intersectionality -- race, gender, class and sexuality?” “How do institutions and interactions influence the construction of intersectional systems and identities?” “How do intersecting social systems and identities influence social institutions, social interactions, and individual experiences?” We will discuss the challenges that intersectionality theories pose for research methods, and interrogate the range of empirical approaches to meet those challenges. We will also look at how sociologists apply specific theories and methods to understand intersectionality within specific institutional arenas, including schools, families and relationships, work and organizations, migration and social movements. Throughout the semester, we will be comparing arguments within the readings, applying the following concepts: cultural and structural processes; implicit and explicit understandings of structure and agency; connections between macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis.
These offer credit for individualized work with a given faculty member.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
Please consult with your advisor and / or Dr. Irene Browne (our Director of Graduate Studies) about enrollment.
These offer credit for ongoing research overseen by a given faculty member.
These offer credit for participation in assistantships (TATT 605C) and for teaching one's own class (TATT 610SOC).
Read more about these credits here.