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SOCY-881*,891*,892*,893*,894*,895*,896*,897*  |
Directed Special Studies |
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Courses arranged especially for those whose interests are not met by other courses.
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| SOCY-898 |
Master's Essay Research |
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Required in Program ii.
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| SOCY-899 |
Master's Thesis Research |
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Required in Program i.
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| SOCY-900* |
Professional and Pedagogical Skills |
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This course is designed to acquaint doctoral students with some aspects of the teaching and research responsibilities of a sociologist and faculty member. It has both theoretical and practical components, and will cover course planning, presentation and preparation as well as planning, organizing, funding and publishing research. Grading is on a Pass/Fail basis. Course is compulsory for doctoral students and is offered every other year. Three term-hours. Offered in 2011-2012.
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| SOCY-901 |
Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Sociology |
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Core Course: All M.A. and Ph.D. students will normally be required to take this seminar course.
This course deals with: i) the relationship of social theory to empirical research; and ii) methodological approaches to the explanation of social phenomena. Discussion will include: the nature of theory and of evaluative criteria for judging theory; the nature of sociological explanations; the role of facts and values in sociological research; and the strengths and weaknesses of the major strategies of social research (qualitative, quantitative and historical). Further specific problem areas will be selected by the convenors in consultation with the seminar group. Full course seminar; three term-hours; fall: S. Gyimah (methods); winter, A. Burfoot (theory)
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| SOCY-910* |
Modes of Sociological Reasoning |
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The objective of this course is to acquaint students with commonalities and differences in modes of sociological reasoning. Students will be expected to grasp and deploy theories that have contrasting ontologies, epistemologies and conceptual structures. The relationship between the discourses of sociology and those of the natural sciences will be a major feature of the course.
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| SOCY-911* |
Contemporary Sociological Theory |
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This course, building on the skills developed in SOCY-901, will focus on the development of contemporary sociological theories to deal with specific problem areas. Precise topics will vary from year to year in response to student interest and need. Three term-hours; winter, R. Day.
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| SOCY-912* |
Classical Sociological Theory |
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This course, building on the skills developed in SOCY-910*, will focus on the structure of classical sociological theory and its relevance for dealing with specific problem areas.
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| SOCY-913* |
Sociology, Modernity and Post-Modernity |
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| SOCY-917* |
Quantitative Methodology |
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This is a graduate level course designed to provide a solid and comprehensive training in quantitative methods employed extensively in the Social Sciences in general and Sociology in particular. It is planned not only to prepare students to carry out and interpret research using a variety of statistical methods but also to acquaint students with problems that arise with the use of these models. The course goes beyond OLS to cover binary logit and probit models, multinomial and ordered logit models, selection models and count data models (Poisson, Negative Binomial and Zero Inflated Poisson). Three term-hours; fall. S. Gyimah.
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| SOCY-918* |
Current Developments in Socio-Legal Theory |
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This course will focus upon a variety of macro, middle and micro level theories in the socio-legal area. The emphasis will be on historical and comparative critical analysis and evaluation using appropriate empirical evidence and studies.
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| SOCY-919* |
Current Developments in Socio-Legal Methodology |
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| SOCY-920* |
Advanced Issues in Socio-Legal Studies |
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This course will examine issues and controversies in the socio-legal area. Topics will vary, but may include some or all of the following: corporate crime, victimology, crime and the elderly, feminist criminology. Three term-hours; winter. S. Baron.
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| SOCY-921* |
The Social Construction of Science and Technology |
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The evolution of science and technology is neither linear nor cumulative. By drawing upon theories of sociology of science and technology, the course argues through the use of case studies that, like other forms of knowledge, scientific and technical knowledge is socially constructed and is embedded in general social relations. Three term-hours; fall. M. Hird.
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| SOCY-922* |
Socio-Historical Perspectives on Communication Technology |
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Special emphasis is placed on the development of electronic technologies of communication in North America and Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These technologies developed within the framework of particular class relations and justifying ideologies which favoured certain patterns of ownership, social diffusion and modes of usage. The nature of this framework and its social consequences are explored with particular reference to recent socio-historical research on the telegraph and the early telephone. Appropriate comparisons are made with recent technological developments, notably the micro- computer and cellular phone.
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| SOCY-923* |
The Labour Process and the New Technology |
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| SOCY-924* |
Knowledge, Information and Culture |
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The expanding role of systematic knowledge in the social institutions and processes of the advanced societies is examined. The codification of data as information within computerized systems is analysed in terms of its social origins and consequences. The cultural implications of social reliance on science-and-technology and expert systems and the diffusion of information within more popular media are explored, with special reference to the concepts of reflexivity and globalization. Relevant theorists include Jurgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Jacques Ellul, Roland Robertson.
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| SOCY-925* |
Feminist Sociological Theory |
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This course deals with feminist critiques of sociological theories, how such theories have been revised and appropriated by feminists and the various perspectives that feminists have developed for interrogating and transforming social hierarchies informed inter alia by gender, class, racism, and heterosexism. Three term-hours; winter. A. Burfoot.
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| SOCY-927* |
Feminist Historical Sociology |
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This course examines major sociological theories of social change, and selected historical sociological studies of macro and micro social change through the critical perspectives of feminist theories, historiography, and research methods.
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| SOCY-928* |
Gender and the Law |
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This course considers various theoretical approaches to understanding the processes by which gender is socially constructed through law, and by which gender affects legal processes. Both public and private law will be analyzed, as will the role of the state in creating, maintaining and changing distinctions between public and private. While contemporary Canadian legal systems will be the central focus, historical and cross- national contexts will also be considered.
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| SOCY-929* |
Feminism, Science and Technology |
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This course is designed to critically expose graduate students to the main tenets of feminist approaches to scientific knowledge and technological innovation and applications. The course focuses primarily on North American and Western European analyses including post-modernity and scientific rationalism, object-relations theory as applied to the construction of scientific knowledge, theories of science and the state, and technological development as masculine endeavor. Issues for women around science and technology in developing countries will also be examined. Medicine, weaponry, production and cultural production are areas which are examined as sites of science and technological applications with both immediate consequences (as medical consumerism, employment possibilities) and long-term implications for women (as the formation and value of knowledge, the medicalization and pathologization of women's experiences, the cultural representation and reproduction of femininity).
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| SOCY-930* |
Technology and Social Control |
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The debate over how technology is implicated in social control is perennial and broad. Relevant twentieth-century theorists include Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Michel Foucault, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Harold Adams Innis. This course explores the insight and compares the perspectives of selected theorists, and applies them specifically to information and communication technologies. The issue of mass surveillance of populations in the advanced societies, by both government and commercial agencies, is analyzed, both to understand the nature of the social processes involved, and to generate discussion of political and policy implications. While the course is necessarily comparative - globalization is both consequence and cause of technological diffusion - opportunity is given to focus on Canadian examples.
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| SOCY-931* |
New Media Cultures |
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We live in cultures which are increasingly organized around or saturated with digital information or new media. In this advanced course we will engage with some of the major commentators on relationships between new media and culture, working through a series of key ideas and problems focused around intersections of theory and practice. Instead of maintaining a domination/resistance conception of cultural industries and practices, we will explore complex dynamics of innovation and consumption across a variety of arenas. There will be scope to engage with notions of mobility, speed, reflection, reflexivity, information, virtuality, consumption, in the context of different spaces or objects (city; home; archive; gallery; brand, memory, sounds, visions, events, body, etc.) and practices (photography, art, writing, listening, tourism, learning, etc.) which exemplify contemporary debates about new media in cultural sociology.
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| SOCY-932* |
Transnational Theories of Race, Gender and Sexuality |
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This course is designed for graduate students interested in questions surrounding the construction and perpetuation of categories of social difference. It explores current theories of concerning social relations of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and other dimensions of difference, and the ways in which these social relations are intersecting and interlocking. The aim of this course is to bring an intersectional analysis to contemporary social concerns, but also to ground that analysis historically. These questions are addressed through a range of theoretical approaches, including critical race theory, transnational feminism, anti-racist feminism, anti-racist theory, postcolonial theory and queer theory.
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| SOCY-933* |
Gender, Power and the Politics of Reproduction |
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Reproductive politics pertain to those who have power over reproduction and its consequences. This includes 1) those who manipulate reproductive choices to advance socio-political agendas and reinforce privilege, and, 2) those who resist such power plays. The focus of this advance course is on the ensuing tension between the two. Students will critically engage with feminist perspectives pertaining to the public and private meanings associated with reproduction and examine how these meanings are contingent on assumptions about gender, sex, class, race, sexuality, culture, physical (dis)ability, marital status, IQ and historical location. We will address such questions as: Is sexual difference necessarily determined by sexual reproduction? How have maternal bodies been positioned in culture; differentiated; represented; valued as appropriate or inappropriate; constituted in relation to the bodies of fetuses, children, women who are not mothers? What is the relationship between the state and reproduction? How has medicine and science impacted reproductive choices and for whose benefit? How have population policies and globalization shaped reproductive politics? Does genetic engineering hold the promise of reproductive freedom? Importantly, we will examine how power and resistance are at the heart of each of these questions.
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COURSES IN RELATED FIELDS: Students may arrange to take certain courses in other fields of graduate study in the University, such as Geography, History, Law, Political Studies, etc. Students wishing to make such arrangements should consult the Coordinator of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology and the Coordinator of Graduate Studies in the department concerned.
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Courses of Instruction 
