Teaching

Some of the graduate and undergraduate courses I regularly teach.

Modern Plain Text Computing   → website

As researchers and scholars we depend on software to get our work done. But often, we do not know enough about how our computers work. Nor are we encouraged to reflect on why they work the way they do, or given any basic grounding in such matters as part of our training. Instead we end up fending for ourselves and pick things up informally. Or, instead of getting on with the task at hand, course instructors are forced to spend time quickly bringing people up to speed about where that document went, or what a file is, or why “that didn’t work” just now. In the worst case, we never get a feel for this stuff at all and end up marinating in an admixture of magical thinking about and sour resentment towards the machines we sit in front of for hours each day, and will likely sit in front of for the rest of our careers.

All of that is bad. This course is meant to help.

Data Wrangling and Data Visualization  

This graduate course teaches the elements of data wrangling and data visualization, mostly in R.

For the data wrangling side, we will not not focus on particular statistical methods or modeling techniques. Rather, we will learn how to accomplish everyday tasks that have to happen before you get to that part. These include topics such as getting your own data into R, rearranging and recoding it, exploring its structure, munging and reshaping tables, and presenting summary tabulations and graphs of this work. We will also examine some more advanced versions of these topics such as managing large datasets, parallelizing tasks, and some of the rudiments of writing functions and maintaining code that any social scientist working with quantitative data should know a bit about.

For the visualization side we we will emphasize the importance of being able to look at and learn from your data yourself and also the best way to present it visually to others. Throughout the course we will emphasize how R and the tidyverse “thinks”. Every dataset is different, especially at stage where it still needs further cleaning or arranging before it can be easily analyzed or effectively presented. This course will teach you the logic and implicit “flow of action” behind the tidyverse’s tools, giving you the ability to apply and extend this way of thinking when working with your own data and its particular challenges.

Visualizing Social Data   → syllabus

Visualizing Social Data teaches how to use modern, widely-used tools to create insightful, beautiful, reproducible visualizations of social science data. We also learn about the theory and practice of efforts to visualize sociological data, and society more generally. We examine different ways of looking at social science data, think about where data comes from in the first place, and explore the implications of choosing to represent it in different ways.

Contemporary Sociological Theory   → syllabus

This graduate-level course is an introduction to some main themes in sociological theory since the 1950s. It is the second of the two-part theory sequence required of first year Ph.D students in the sociology department. It is not a general introduction either to social theory broadly conceived or to humanities-style “Theory”.

Social Theory from Marx to Parsons   → syllabus

This graduate-level course is an intensive introduction to some main themes in social theory. It is the first of a two-part sequence required of first year Ph.D students in the sociology department.

Organizations and Management   → syllabus

This upper-division sociology course is also taught as part of the Markets and Management Program. It surveys the development of modern organizations and organizational analysis. The focus is on for-profit firms, but we will also look at other complex organizations as we go. We will explore different explanations of how organizations work, why they fail, how they should be managed, and how they connect with other aspects of society. The course will give you a critical grounding in basic organizational theory, and teach you how to put these ideas to work in the analysis of both real organizations and the huge body of scholarly and popular literature about them.

Taboo Markets   → syllabus

This course is about taboo, stigmatized, or otherwise morally controversial markets. Examples include trade in alcohol and other drugs, sex work, gambling, baby-selling, paid domestic labor, care work, human blood, organs, eggs, sperm, genetic material, viaticals, and pollution rights. We will read empirical studies and ethical arguments about these markets, focusing mostly on how exchange in these goods is practically accomplished and morally justified in theory and practice. We will also consider broader questions about the scope and limits, if any, of the market as a social institution, and its relationship to other sorts of exchange.

Sociological Inquiry   → syllabus

This course is an introduction to sociology for majors and non-majors. We will explore how social networks, organizations, and institutions influence people’s identities and beliefs, their opportunities in life, and their everyday choices. We will investigate how class, gender, race, and cultural differences are created and maintained in places like the college campus, hospitals, the workplace, and elsewhere. We will learn about an apply some of the tools sociologists use to study these processes. As we go, we will also consider ethical controversies surrounding these and related topics. This course fulfills SS, CCI, and EI general education requirements. It will also help prepare students for the behavioral science portion of the MCAT exam.

Social Theory through Complaining   → syllabus

This course is an intensive introduction to some main themes in social theory. It is required of first year Ph.D students in the sociology department. Each week we will focus on something grad students complain about when they are forced to take theory. You are required to attend under protest, write a paper that’s a total waste of your time, and complain constantly. Passive-aggressive silence will not be sufficient for credit.

Gifts and Debts   → syllabus

This graduate-level special topics course explores some current debates at the intersection of economic sociology and the sociology of culture. The theme of the course is Gifts and Debts. There are no formal prerequisites for students in the department, but the course can be thought of as following on from both Lisa Keister’s Economic Sociology seminar and Steve Vaisey’s Sociology of Culture seminar, both of which were offered last semester. We begin by reading some of the social theory of gift exchange and debt, mostly from sociology and anthropology, and go on to consider recent scholarship on systems of gift exchange in various goods, together with work on consumer credit, credit systems and credit scoring, and inequality.

Organization, Violence, and the State   → syllabus

This is a graduate-level reading course on the sociology of war, violence, and the modern state, with an emphasis on the organizational and institutional aspects of collective violence and state-building. Because it is not a regular seminar, the readings in the syllabus are presented in sequence but not as weekly class meetings.