Environment, Social Movements, and Work

Interdisciplinary introductory course explores how food shapes and is shaped by culture and society. Examines how people use food to express meanings (e.g., via foodways, story, art, architecture, religion, ethical codes), how food options, practices, and inequities are shaped by social structures (e.g. cultural and legal norms regarding race, class, and gender), and how the material properties of food (e.g., chemical, ecological, technological) are linked to identities, ideological commitments, and historical moments.

Examines the nature, extent, and causes of social problems in the United States and around the globe from multiple perspectives. Emphasizes the role of social structural forces including conflicting economic, racial, ethnic, national, and gender interests in the creation and perpetuation of social problems. Discussion of poverty, work, health care, drugs, terrorism, human rights, and social change.

Social construction of race and ethnicity. Relations among ethnic and racial groups. Immigration and patterns of racial and ethnic integration. Social structures and processes that perpetuate racial and ethnic stratification. Consideration of economic, social, political, and health challenges facing racial/ethnic minority groups in U.S. society. 

The study of collective attempts to address social injustices and implement other social change in and across societies. Explores sociological and interdisciplinary conceptions of social movements and their relationships to society. Social movement emergence, development, engagement with opponents and authorities, and impact, as shaped by opportunity structures, mobilizing structures and processes, framing, collective identity, strategy and tactics, and other factors. How social movements oppose or promote inequality, oppression, or violence in the U.S. or elsewhere, at the local, national, and transnational level. Application of political process and other current social movement theories.

Causes and consequences of environmental and climate injustices; interactions between social inequalities (race, gender, class, position in world-system) and environmental pollution, food and land injustice, climate injustice, and environmental health; environmental racism in environmental policies and practices; political-economic barriers to achieving environmental justice; evaluation of environmental justice reforms and sustainability initiatives; possibilities for system change; social movement strategies for achieving environmental and climate justice; case studies in environmental justice and injustice.

The concept of community in Appalachia using an interdisciplinary approach and experiential learning. Interrelationships among geographically, culturally, and socially constituted communities, public policy, and human development.

Examination of the role that gender plays in shaping the experience of work, focusing especially on the persistence of occupational segregation by sex, its causes and implications. Also, the interaction of work and family life, including the allocation of household work and control of resources. Social policies affecting gender relations in work organizations will be analyzed.

Distinguishes global from international. Examines social globalization and cultural globalization and what forms they take. Explores changes in the role of nation-states and the implications of global changes in the division of labor for economic, gender, and racial/ethnic inequalities. Discusses how globalization is linked with peace, violence, and human rights. Considers alternative and more equitable forms of globalizations and how social movements might lead to such alternatives.

A variable topics course in the foundational areas of Sociology. In-depth examination of Environmental Sociology.

The analysis of the economic activities of women in contemporary society. The past and present relationship between womens domestic and market labor is examined, followed by an in-depth investigation of womens labor force experiences. Competing sociological explanations are examined, providing the basis for exploring occupational segregation, inequalities of outcomes and comparable worth.