The United States is perhaps the wealthiest society in human history and yet we have the highest level of poverty of any high-income country. Moreover, our uniquely high poverty rate has remained more-or-less stagnant for a half-century. This course aims to understand persistent American poverty in the midst of plenty in two overarching parts. We begin by briefly acquiring analytic tools for explaining why some people are poor by comparing measures of poverty and by introducing theories of the causes of poverty. We then move to the core goal of Part 1—describing the social conditions of poverty by surveying key geographic contexts in which deprivation is especially deep and persistent. We examine Native American reservations, Appalachia, the Southwest border and migrant farmworker communities, and the Southern Black Belt before going into the greatest depth on urban poverty. We also briefly look at how global economic integration is linked to poverty both within the United States and across the Global South. Part 2 opens with comparing theories of the causes of poverty, emphasizing the contrast between individualistic and structural explanations. We then shift to the consequences of poverty by studying its relationship to other social phenomena such as health, housing, environmental quality, crime and incarceration. The final segment engages with the question of “what is to be done?” by studying policies that affect poor people, the politics that underly them, and the conditions of possibility for political projects that eliminate poverty in America.

The syllabus is available here.

“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

This course introduces the concerns and principles of sociology through examination of human interaction with the natural environment. It places environmental issues such as resource depletion, population growth, food production, environmental regulation, and sustainability in national and global perspectives. The second day of the course raises the specter of climate catastrophe and additional interlinked global environmental crises that can be said to represent humanity’s “power over Nature.” We spend the rest of the semester investigating their underlying social causes, their uneven social consequences, and the desirability and feasibility of their political responses. That is, we examine how use and control of the natural and built environment works as an instrument in the reproduction of social inequalities. We do so in three parts.

Part 1 examines the historical origins of ecological crises in North America. Each session introduces a natural resource or environmental issue in tandem with the social dynamics relevant to its causes and consequences. We move from the commons and the origins of capitalism, to coal and the Industrial Revolution, to environmental injustices linked to residential segregation and the siting of polluting facilities, to America’s sprawling patterns of urban development, to issues of water, mining and agriculture.

Part 2 turns to ecological crises in the Global South. We begin by introducing Malthusian fears about over population and their critiques from approaches like demographic transition theory. We briefly look at issues of agriculture and the Green Revolution before examining late industrialization, neoliberal economic restructuring, urban informal settlements and deforestation. We conclude with a view of new forms of resource extraction entailed by the green transition.

Part 3 focuses on the problem of climate change. We first look at the forms of vulnerability to climate disruption and the prospect of climate-driven conflict and migration. We then examine the underlying social and economic causes of greenhouse gas emissions like externalities, common pool resources, consumerism, and the political influence of polluting industries. We wrap up the course by debating policy solutions and their underlying political conditions of possibility, including abundance liberalism, degrowth and Green New Deal approaches.

A draft of the syllabus for summer 2026 can be found here.

Sociological analysis of relationships among economic growth, environmental sustainability and social justice in the developing world. Considers frameworks for understanding poverty, hunger, educational and technological inequality, and the impact of globalization on prospects for socially and ecologically sustainable development.

“International development” has many meanings but in the very simplest terms we can think of it as a path to well-being. In this course, we will study the key social processes that shape prospects for well-being in communities around the globe, the global institutions and other powerful actors that govern those processes, and the alternative projects that communities themselves devise to shape their fate in an increasingly global economy. That means examining how development has played out historically as both an intentional project of policies and interventions that aim to promote well-being and as an immanent process of social change that continually transforms our economic and ecological life.

In the first part of the semester, we look at the prospects and limitations for economic growth—and how it is distributed—to contribute to well-being, the constraints to growth faced by countries in the Global South, the strategies states have used to accelerate growth, and the set of challenges presented in the era of neoliberal globalization. We will also introduce several of the most influential theoretical frameworks for understanding development, such as modernization, dependency, world systems, neoliberal, new institutional economics, post-development, and developmental state theories.

In the second half, we turn to the implications of development for the health of people and of the natural systems that sustain life. In particular, we will focus on the unequal and unjust impacts of climate change, the role that capitalist development has played in creating the climate crisis, and the politics of mitigating emissions. We conclude with a look at urban development in the cities of the Global South and a survey of social movements that are challenging the path that development has taken.

The syllabus is available here.

Sociology 181 is intended to provide an introductory overview of the discipline of sociology. To provide breath, the class will survey (a) a selection of the sub-fields and specialized areas of research in sociology; (b) a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding social life; and (c) foundational research methods used by sociologists, both quantitative and qualitative. In order to achieve meaningful depth, we won’t try to cover everything. The overarching themes will focus on economic inequality, racial inequality, and power & politics. As a course that satisfies Part B of the General Education Communication Requirement, we will focus heavily on developing social scientific research, writing, and communication skills.