Social Problems

Revolution and Social Movements. Urbanization and Globalization. War and Genocide. These are all examples of social change, and sociology, the discipline for which this course serves as introduction, seeks to understand, and explain, them all and other transformations too. We focus in particular on how technology and power relations help us explain variations in social change, and how culture shapes our recognition and evaluation of those transformations. Although analyzing the USA today is our common ground, our method is both comparative (other societies) and historical (focusing especially on the 20th and 21st centuries).