SOC 362 - Culture and Inequality in Contemporary Communities

How do cultural processes reinforce social inequality? What meanings and practices serve to hide, normalize, or validate stratifications between individuals and social groups? What makes subordinate groups create subversive cultures in the struggle for community, dignity, and equity? This conference draws on cultural sociology to address all these questions and more. We start with classical texts, establishing key concepts (such as symbolic boundaries and intersectionality) in the field of study. We then focus on case studies tackling issues as diverse as elite education and privilege, poverty and social aids, economic restructuring and gentrification, sexual minorities and the city. Throughout these studies, we pay attention to the cultural processes within which class, gender, and race inequalities are rendered invisible or unproblematic and thus socially normalized. Further, we look at the process of contestation through which communities use social relations and cultural frames to defend themselves against top-down economic, social, and political changes.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): SOC 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.