Summer 2021 and Summer 2025
This course provides a broad introduction to the field of criminology by exploring the following questions: What are the underlying social and political causes of different patterns in crime and victimization? What social, political, or cultural factors explain how crime is defined and how society responds to it? Which crimes are punished more severely than others, and why? What are the different theoretical and methodological challenges related to how to measure and study crime? What are the contradictions and conflicts surrounding different law enforcement and policy approaches to reducing crime? While we focus specifically on patterns of crime and the workings of the criminal justice system in the U.S., we also draw on examples from other societies, states, and spaces.
This course provides an introduction to the major concepts, sociological theories, and social scientific research methods used by sociologists to study society and human social behavior. Drawing on a broad range of sociological frameworks and methodologies, we survey how sociology examines and explains various social phenomena related to group formations, constructions of the self, socialization, social inequalities, and the development and transformation of social institutions. We begin the course by grounding ourselves in the foundations of sociological theory and research. We will then examine various aspects of social structures, in particular the construction of hierarchies related to race, gender, class, and nationality. We then explore sociological phenomena across a range of social institutions, including healthcare, criminal justice, education, and politics, as well as the dynamics of social movements fighting for equity and social justice.
This class explores the connections between policing and struggles for more just and equal cities. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from sociology, Black studies, geography, history, and criminology, we explore how the origins and development of different policing practices are intertwined with the racialization of space as well as how movements for racial, economic, and spatial justice make these connections. We examine the evolution of these dynamics in the US context, focusing on the origins of policing, gendered and racialized post-Emancipation policing practices in US cities, the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s, struggles for just cities in the 21st century, and the relationship between gentrification and policing. While focusing on US cities, we also draw on connections with policing and urban inequality in other nations, such as Brazil and South Africa. Students gain hands-on experience in conducting interdisciplinary and critical research on urban inequality and policing as we explore these topics through collaborative and creative projects that draw on a range of data sources and modes of research communication that span across disciplines.
How are historical and contemporary forms of urban inequality, such as residential segregation, discrimination in housing and labor markets, racial disparities in policing and surveillance, and displacement from gentrification and other forms of urban redevelopment, shaped by the intersections of racism and colonialism? Drawing on approaches from sociology, Black studies, Indigenous studies, geography, and history, this course examines the historical and contemporary entanglements of racism, colonialism, and urban space. We focus on understanding how intersecting racisms and colonialisms impinge upon the geographies and lives of African diasporic, Indigenous, and racially marginalized populations. We examine the institutions, cultures, politics, and economies integral to the racialization and colonization of urban space and the social movements and geographies that resist them. We begin the course by grounding ourselves in the theory and method of W.E.B. Du Bois’s urban sociology, exemplified in his classic social scientific study, The Philadelphia Negro. This text serves as our guide as we move geographically and historically through the core themes of this course, such as residential segregation, racial capitalism, uneven development, the gendered racial politics of urban space, Black and Indigenous social movements against urban segregation and marginalization, and contemporary politics of neoliberalism and gentrification.
The course grapples with a range of questions regarding the production, consumption, and regulation of drugs, including: What are the underlying social and political causes of different patterns in drug consumption, production, and regulation? Why are some drugs heavily criminalized while others are seen as a socially acceptable form of having fun or relaxing? We will seek to answer these questions and more by examining how the production, consumption, and regulation of drugs relate to group formations, state policies, social inequalities and oppressions, and different forms of cultural expression. This class introduces students to different approaches to thinking critically about the sociology of drugs and how the social life of drugs shapes and is shaped by political, cultural, and economic phenomena. More specifically, we examine how drug production, consumption, and regulation are socially constructed and how drugs play a pivotal role in political and social conflicts and formations, specifically those concerning race, class, gender, and citizenship. On this note, the political project in the US of the War on Drugs and its attendant social impacts is a central theme throughout the course.
Kent-Stoll, Peter. 2023. “The Erasure of Indigenous People from the Urban
Imaginary: Understanding Settler Colonialism and the Logics of Elimination.”
TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology, August.
Washington DC: American Sociological Association
This activity introduces students to thinking critically about settler colonialism, specifically within a US context, and how it operates through a logics of elimination by examining how take-for-granted assumptions about race, space, and history reproduce settler-colonial worldviews. In part I, students are briefly introduced to the concept of settler colonialism. They reflect on their baseline knowledge of what colonialism is, what its impacts are, and what cities and territories have the largest populations of Native Americans. In part II, students are then asked what percentage of Native American populations reside in urban areas, again reflecting on why they chose these answers. Then, students see the correct answers to questions, from parts I and II, reflecting on the sources of assumptions about these numbers. In part III, students are shown a clip from Cree director Neil Diamond’s (2009) film Reel Injun, followed by a discussion reflecting on the role that mainstream representations of American Indians play in creating settler colonial and racist images of Indigenous people as belonging to the past and confined to rural spaces. The activity will end with an assessment in which students reflect on the importance of understanding the similarities and differences between anti-Indigenous and other racisms. This activity works well for introduction to sociology or social problems courses, urban sociology, courses in the social sciences and humanities on racism in entertainment media, and sociology of race and ethnicity courses.