Courses

This course focuses on attitudes toward death, funeral practices in various cultures, the cultural components of mourning, and the social organization of death and dying in bureaucratic settings such as the hospital and nursing home.

Origin and nature of problems and processes in developing areas: interrelationships between institutions, social change, and poverty.

This course examines the changing scientific and popular understandings of the effect, harms, benefits, and patterns of drug use as well as the historical and ongoing debates about drug policy. Most of the major recreational drugs (opiates, cocaine, cannabis, psychedelics, alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) will be discussed in comparative and historical perspective.

An examination of the broad social, economic, and political characteristics of educational institutions, policies and practices and their ramifications.

This course examines friendship and other primary relationships from a sociological perspective. Social psychological and sociological theory are used to understand friendship as a social phenomenon. The course focuses on friendship as a type of social relationship; how it reflects and affects social structures is discussed.

This course approaches gambling as a social construction, as a thriving business, as an interpersonal and familial problem, and as a public policy issue. Issues include legalization, management and industry control, problem and compulsive gambling, the meaning of and generational perception of gambling, and the future of gambling.

Concerns the relationship between ideas and the social structure. Theories proposed by Marxists, phenomenologists, and functionalists to explain the relationship are examined.

This course examines the role of law in society and the development of legal institutions in the United States from colonial times to the present.

An examination of the relevance of sociology and its perspectives with regard to the profession of medicine, its interpersonal dimensions, the training of medical personnel, and epidemiology. Emphasis is placed on the social as well as the biological and healing dimensions of medicine.

The nature of religion, its relationship to other institutions, and its changing role and function in modern society.