Courses in sociology, research methods, and statistics.

An introduction to how social knowledge is made: turning a curiosity into an answerable question, and turning numbers into a claim that holds up before a skeptic.

Approach

Each student carries one original research project from question to final presentation. Every technique is taught twice, once as a procedure and once as a claim that someone could challenge.

Key topics

• The logic of comparison: a finding means little without the case it is compared against
• Sampling: every sample makes an argument about who was left out
• Simpson's paradox and the ecological fallacy: the same data can reverse depending on the grouping
• Reading a p-value: the most common misunderstanding in the social sciences

The sociological imagination: learning to see personal troubles as public issues and to trace how society shapes the self.

Approach

The course is organized around one question: why do patterned outcomes persist across millions of individual choices? C. Wright Mills's framework is used as a working tool every week.

Key topics

• Mills and the sociological imagination: the link between biography and history
• Individual and structure: the central problem of the discipline
• Du Bois and the color line: sociology as the study of a divided society
• Reproduction through institutions: how family, school, and work pass outcomes down

Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and the traditions they began, read closely and applied to the present.

Approach

Durkheim's Suicide is taught as a methods text, showing that the founders worked as empirical scientists. Each theorist is then tested against a contemporary case.

Key topics

• Marx: alienation, the commodity, and value as a social relation
• Durkheim's Suicide: the most private act explained by social facts
• Weber: causation, and how ideas move history
• The micro-macro problem: the fault line that still runs through the field

Empirical inquiry across the qualitative and quantitative traditions, with an emphasis on designs that could, in principle, prove the researcher wrong.

Approach

Each design is examined for blind spots before data collection begins. Qualitative and quantitative methods are presented as tools for different questions.

Key topics

• Question and method: the choice that shapes everything after it
• Validity: measuring what you claim to measure
• Research ethics: who is studied and who is heard
• Triangulation: what combining methods can and cannot establish

Statistical reasoning for social data: categorical measures, messy samples, and the inferences such data will and will not support.

Approach

For every test, students state the assumption whose failure would invalidate the result. The normal distribution is treated as an assumption that must be justified.

Key topics

• Measurement: every variable encodes a claim about a concept
• The sampling distribution: the basis of all inference
• Regression as controlled comparison: what holding a variable constant means
• Simpson's paradox: why structure cannot be skipped

A first course in statistical thinking, focused on reasoning honestly from data.

Approach

Students read real published claims and ask whether each could be an artifact. Statistical literacy is presented as a civic skill, as useful to a voter or juror as to a researcher.

Key topics

• Describe before testing: most errors occur before any test is run
• Probability and coincidence: why rare events happen to someone every day
• Samples and populations: the gap between a number and what it stands for
• Correlation and cause: the third variable and other old traps

How societies define, produce, and respond to problems such as poverty, addiction, and crime, and why the definition of a problem is itself a social act.

Approach

Problems are studied as contests over definition. Each is paired with a policy that failed to solve it and the evidence that was available at the time.

Key topics

• The social construction of problems: why a condition is ignored in one era and urgent in another
• Poverty as structure: from blaming the poor to explaining poverty
• The war on drugs: a case of policy that enlarged the problem it targeted

Class, status, and power: how advantage is produced, passed across generations, and justified.

Approach

The course is built around the Davis-Moore debate: is inequality functionally necessary, or a justification offered by those who benefit? Students use the birth-lottery model to estimate how much of an outcome is fixed before a person acts.

Key topics

• Marx and Weber on class: ownership and life chances, the two founding maps
• Davis-Moore and its critics: whether inequality is necessary at all
• Bourdieu and reproduction: how advantage appears as taste and talent
• The birth lottery: how much of a life is set by place of birth

The social construction of race and ethnicity and its material consequences, from prejudice and discrimination to institutional inequality.

Approach

The course separates individual prejudice from institutional structure and uses the ecological fallacy to show how group statistics are misread. Du Bois's color line is the organizing frame.

Key topics

• Du Bois and double consciousness: a founding text in the sociology of race
• Construction and consequence: how a social category shapes wealth, health, and longevity
• Institutional and individual: why ending prejudice alone would not end inequality
• The ecological fallacy: the statistical error behind many misreadings of racial data

Substance use as a social phenomenon, shaped by culture, distributed by inequality, and governed by policy.

Approach

Use is studied in relation to inequality and power: why the same behavior is treated as illness in one place and as a felony in another. Drug policy history runs through the course as a sustained case study.

Key topics

• Social and medical models: addiction as moral failing, disease, or social position
• Set and setting: why one substance means different things in different lives
• The history of drug law: how similar substances received very different sentences
• Harm reduction and prohibition: the policy debate with the highest stakes