My Courses

Sociology 1:  Introduction to Sociology (Fall 2023)

Sociology 70:  Immigration, Race, and American Society (last taught in spring 2017)

No other phenomenon is remaking contemporary societies more than international migration. According to the United Nations, in 2013 there were 232 million international labor migrants (~10-15% of them unauthorized) and 15.7 million officially-recognized refugees worldwide. In the United States alone, in 2015 there were roughly 41 million foreign-born immigrants (~25% of them unauthorized), and together with their children, they made up a full quarter of the total U.S. population. The movement of people across nation-state boundaries and their settlement in various receiving societies – from the European nations that used to send their citizens to the United States more than a century ago, to oil-rich Middle Eastern states and developing nations – has the potential to alter the nature and significance of fundamental institutions and organizing categories, such as citizenship, the nation-state, race, ethnicity, gender, and class.

This course provides an introductory look into the topic of, and the major debates surrounding, international migration, using the United States as a local lens for understanding important phenomena that are occurring in other countries, too. We begin by asking questions such as: Why do people migrate across international borders? Can nation-states control migration, especially “unwanted” or “unauthorized” migration? What are the policies that the United States has developed to let some people in while keeping others out, or to categorize different groups within its borders?

We then consider assimilation and incorporation, the processes by which foreign “outsiders” become integrated into their new societies and homes, as well as resistance to foreign outsiders by natives. Here, we ask questions such as: Are immigrants and their children becoming part of or assimilating into the U.S. mainstream? What is the “mainstream”?   How do sociologists theorize, measure, and evaluate immigrant incorporation? Of particular interest are debates around straight-line assimilation, segmented assimilation, and transnationalism, and we will examine the experiences of the immigrants themselves, as well as their children (the “second generation”), as we navigate among these theories. We will also pay attention to how immigrant incorporation is shaped not only by immigrants’ own characteristics and efforts, but more importantly, by the characteristics and efforts of their receiving countries and communities.

Finally, we end the course by looking at how arrival of immigrant newcomers affects the economic, cultural, social, and political dynamics of the countries and communities that receive them. Here we will pay special attention to topical debates about how international migration both challenges and reshapes two traditional types of membership in the United States: (a) race and ethnicity and (b) citizenship and national belonging. Parallels to debates about these questions in other countries will be highlighted, but the focus is primarily on the United States.

There are no prerequisites for taking this course. It is open to anyone with an interest in immigration and a willingness to examine the difficult moral, political, and academic questions that immigration raises in the 21^st century, especially in relation to race, law, and human rights. Understanding why people move and what happens to them; what happens to the societies that receive immigrants; and how international migration helps to connect new people and places in a globalizing world is one of the critical policy issues of the new millennium.

Assignments include: a quantitative statistical profile assignment; a take-home video essay assignment; and a qualitative interview assignment (which serves as the final exam essay).

Required textbooks:

Golash-Boza, Tanya. 2011. Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Cainkar, Louise A. 2009. Homeland Insecurity:  The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11. New York:  Russell Sage Foundation.

Marrow, Helen B. 2011.  New Destination Dreaming:  Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South.  Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press.

Sociology 72:  Sociology of Latinxs (last taught in Fall 2022)

In 2020, the Hispanic/Latino/Latinx/Latine population in the United States population numbered over 60 million people – almost 19% of all Americans. By the year 2060, it is estimated to grow to 129 million people – roughly 31%.  This course examines the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories of individuals who are now commonly identified as “Hispanics/Latinos/Latinxs/Latines” in the United States, paying special attention to the three largest ethnic subgroups among them (Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans) but also to other Caribbean, Central, and South Americans, too.

One major goal of the course is to introduce students to the great diversity that exists within this growing U.S. minority group – diversity evident by social class, language and accent, gender and sexuality, geographic location, religion, race/ethnicity, skin color, ancestry, citizenship and legal status, national origin, and immigrant generation and cohort, among other variables.  A second goal is for students to understand how the “Hispanic” panethnic category developed and consolidated between 1960 and 1990, so that you can better wrestle with the central question of how and why Latinxs are often thought of and treated as one single racial/ethnic group, despite having so much internal diversity and a range of lived experiences. Finally, the course will examine Latinxs’ experiences across several key social institutions – particularly schools, neighborhoods, the labor market, media, the immigration and criminal justice systems, and the American racial hierarchy – using key sociological works to do so.

There are no prerequisites for taking this course. It is open to anyone with an interest in developing a fuller understanding of who Latinxs are in the 21^st century and how they constitute, have contributed to, and have been shaped by U.S. society. It is also intended to be a sociological complement to various other courses on Latinx studies and populations offered throughout the university (e.g., in History, Romance Languages, RCD, Theatre and more), including ones that take a stronger transnational or comparative perspective.

Assignments include: a group media portrayal assignment; 10 personal reading longs in response to the assigned readings; and a qualitative interview assignment.

Required textbooks:

Mora, G. Cristina. 2014. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats & Media Constructed a New American. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Jiménez, Tomás R. 2010. Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eckstein, Susan Eva. 2009. The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland.  New York: Routledge.

Abrego, Leisy J. 2014.  Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rios, Victor R. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press.

Sociology 100:  Research Design and Interpretation (offered by other professors in 2023-24)

This course is an introduction to the research methods sociologists use to under­stand and explain social phenomena as they build and test theory through careful empirical observation. Students will learn to craft sociological ques­tions and how to design research best able to answer them. The course will introduce students to the primary methods currently used to gather data in the discipline (surveys, experiments, field work, in-depth interviewing, and sec­ondary analysis of existing data), highlighting the strengths and limitations of each approach. The work will be interactive and hands-on, requiring students to try different data collection techniques and to share their experiences with the class. In addition, students will learn techniques for analyzing data once they have been gathered, including a brief introduction to SPSS (statistical package for the social sciences) and Dedoose (software for qualitative data analysis). Students will also become skilled consumers of sociological research by applying their evolving knowledge base to the interpretation and critical assessment of recent journal articles. The course will also include an examina­tion of the ethical issues involved with social research and discussions about the limitations of the positivist model of scientific inquiry in sociology. Please note: While this course is not a prerequisite for Quantitative or Qualitative Methods (SOC 101 / 102), students will find it an excellent foundation for future meth­odological coursework and vital for successful independent research.

Assignments include two in-class exams (a midterm and a final) and five brief research team assignments.

Required textbooks:

Gordon, Liahna E. 2019. Real Research: Research Methods Sociology Students Can Use [2^nd Ed.]. New York: Sage.

Sociology 102:  Qualitative Research Methods (Fall 2023)

As you have taken your various Sociology courses, you probably have begun to develop some sociological questions of your own. This course is a chance to formulate those questions in a more focused way, and to begin to answer them by designing and conducting your own original qualitative research project.

In this course, you will first become familiar with the epistemological underpinnings of qualitative research and related ethical issues. You will then learn to craft sociological questions, design effective research instruments, gather data that address your questions, and code and interpret your data’s significance in relation to research published by other sociologists.  Finally, you will share your findings with your fellow students.  While there are many qualitative methodologies ranging from archival research to focus groups to content analysis, this semester you will work primarily with ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews that you will be able conduct on a topic of your own choosing.

In this course, you will become part of a “community” in which things get messy as you help one another to find your way.  In light of this, you are expected to invest yourselves fully in the course, committing not only to do your best possible work at all times but also to work with your fellow students to help them reach their full potential.  Your reward will be a project that you can be proud of, and a set of organizational and analytical skills that will be valuable to many employers and graduate programs in a wide range of careers.

Prerequisite: Two Sociology courses or consent of the instructor.

Required textbooks:

Warren, Carol A. B. and Tracy Xavia Karner. 2015. Discovering Qualitative Methods: Ethnography, Interviews, Documents, and Images [3rd Ed.]. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Sociology 145:  Social Policy in America (tbd)

Americans contentiously debate issues having to do with poverty and racial inequality; the well-being of families and children; and immigration and citizenship.  This course examines the historical development and contemporary politics of social policies in these arenas in the United States.  We will consider how various issues in these arenas get defined as social problems to be addressed by public policy rather than some other form of social change, like technological innovation or grassroots social organizing.  We will also consider the myriad of factors that go into the policymaking process – including mass public opinion, academic and policy elites, organized interest groups, and political institutions such as Congress and the courts – to examine how policy gets created, why some alternatives are implemented but others abandoned, and why some interests are privileged over others along the way.  Finally, we will consider how policy gets implemented on the ground, looking at how it ameliorates some of the risks individuals face over a lifetime but not others, and at how its design can feed back and shape politics in a given policy arena.

Students can expect to emerge from this course with important substantive knowledge about several realms of U.S. social life, politics, and public policy. They will also gain a critical appreciation of the relationships among academic research, politics, and the policymaking process, which will help them to think more clearly about societal problems and alternative possible responses to them.

Prerequisite: Sociology 1 or 10, or consent of instructor.

Sociology 190:  Immigration (Seminar):  Public Opinion, Politics, and the Media (last taught in Spring 2023)

Immigration is back at the forefront of American culture, law, and policy. The percentage of immigrants in the total U.S. population (13.7% in 2020) is nearing its previous crest (14.7% in 1910), and together with their children, immigrants now make up a full quarter of the total U.S. population. In 2015, Republican hopeful Donald Trump made immigrants a target of ire in his bid for the Presidency, which his Administration subsequently carried out after 2016, not only by placing dramatic restrictions on refugee/asylee, legal permanent resident, and various temporary “nonimmigrant” admissions, but also by trying to expire discretionary status programs (e.g., DACA and TPS), to backlog immigration courts, to erect new barriers to naturalization, to fortify national policies of detention, deportation, and family separation, and to complete the U.S.-Mexico “border wall”. The Biden Administration has made some progress reversing these trends, but the Covid-19 pandemic provided new framing and justification for many of the restrictionist measures already in place.  Meanwhile, politicians continue to debate the merits of an “enforcement-oriented” versus “incorporation-oriented” approach to undocumented immigration, trying to overcome heated legislative stalemates from 2006-07 and 2013; state and local policy-making (both inclusionary and exclusionary) on immigration-related continues to expand; and the American public continues to tout long-standing worries over the “assimilability” of new immigrant arrivals and their potential impacts on American economy, society, culture, and security.

This seminar provides a detailed look at the deeply contested issues of immigration and immigrant integration/exclusion in the U.S. context, focusing in on the complex interrelationships between public opinion, politics and policy-making, and the media. The first part of the seminar will be devoted to an overview of basic research and debates in U.S. immigration research. Here we will briefly cover the determinants of post-1965 immigration flows; U.S. immigration policy and legislation; contexts of reception and modes of incorporation; undocumented immigration and refugee flows; major theories of “assimilation”; and long-standing debates over the impacts of immigration on the economy and labor market as well as on national identity, culture, and security. Importantly, we will ground and contextualize the current restrictive moment in notable historical parallels, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1887, the National Origins Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996. We will also examine two key paradoxes: the first between an expanding temporary migration regime (since the 1990s) and closing “front doors” to almost all other entry categories (since 2016, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic), and the second between American efforts to provide “humanitarian relief” to selected “refugees” while excluding and denying the same to other migrants, in an effort to uphold national sovereignty and power.

Once students have this working knowledge, the second part of the course will bring in public opinion, politics and policy-making, and the media more centrally, in that order. We first analyze (often surprisingly incorporative) trends in American public opinion on immigration, and then link them up to important elements in the (often more exclusionary) political process. Next, we analyze the role that the media plays in both reflecting and actively shaping public opinion on immigration, analyzing key studies from both traditional and new media in the United States as our models, and delving into social media by the end. Along the way, students will be exposed to three key research methods that scholars often employ in this field: (1) surveys of public opinion; (2) content analyses of media portrayals; and (3) experiments that link the two. By the end of the semester, students will not only have a strong foundation from which to pursue other areas of immigration research in academic, policy, and media environments. They will also have a better understanding of how the transition from traditional to new media intersects with growing political polarization and stalemate over immigration policy.

This is an upper division undergraduate seminar, so each in-person class session will be mostly student-led discussion of the assigned readings—drawn from both (a) the discussion leaders and (b) weekly personal logs that all students will write in response to the assigned readings—combined with presentations by the course instructor where appropriate as well as occasional multimedia presentations for group analysis. There is also a 15-page independent final research paper that students will work on throughout the course, mostly in the second half.

Prerequisite: 2 Sociology and/or Political Science courses (may be overridden with course instructor’s consent).

Required textbooks:

Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2014.  Immigrant America:  A Portrait [4th edition].  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chavez, Leo R. 2001. Covering Immigration:  Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Haynes, Chris, Jennifer L. Merolla, and S. Karthick Ramakrishnan. 2016. Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy. New York: Russell Sage.

and either: 

Jordán Wallace, Sophia and Chris Zepeda-Millán. 2020. Walls, Cages, and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

or:

Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, Vivian Louie, and Roberto Suro (Eds.). 2011. Writing Immigration:  Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue.  Berkeley: University of California Press.