SOAN 453B: SENIOR SEMINAR:
Senior Seminar:  Issues in Contemporary Sociology:
Social Problems in Global-Historical Perspective
WED 2:45-5:15 AL 432
Colgate University
Fall 2004 Professor Thomas Hall
Office:  408 Alumni, x7083, email:  tdhall@mail.colgate.edu
OFFICE HOURS:  Tu 2:45-4; W 1:30-2:30 & 5:20-6, Th 12-1, & by appt
Welcome to Senior Seminar
Last Updated 8-19-04

Obviously, you got here! This page is to let you know a bit about this course. If you have questions bring them to the first days. You can email me, but I will be out of the US until the 29th and will have only sporadic access to email. If I can I will answer any questions.

I will lay out much of this in our first half-meeting, 8-30.  For an idea about this seminar see my DePauw web pages for SOC 410 from Spring 04.  I have made some changes.  Some changes were based on discussions with students at the end of Spring 04.  Some changes were based on adaptations to Colgate. 

Please think about the social problem you would like to study this term.  I will help you with this, but think in terms of some issue you find interesting enough to stay with all term.  Where you have more than one possible topic, pick one for which the library has good holdings.  No need to make the term overly difficult.

We will begin our readings in Lappe, Clark, and Sklair.  I will assign specific chapters at our first meeting, to have ready for Wednesday.

Seminar differs from other courses in that it emphasizes DOING Sociology or Anthropology rather than just reading about it.  Still, we need a topic and some common ground.  That is what the readings are for.  We will move through these readings quickly.  Here you are reading for ideas, and at least in terms of the Lappe, Courtwright, and the Case Studies in Clark, as examples of what a thesis might be like.  So you will read for big ideas as opposed to the kind of details you usually emphasize when you prepare for an exam.  I will talk more about this during in seminar.

Finally, seminar requires intense participation.  However, you will find that such participation will help you immensely in completing your thesis.

What is senior seminar?

Senior seminar is a CAPSTONE course. That is, it is intended to help you pull your sociological learning, and the faculty hopes, all your other learning together in a meaningful way. The seminar requires that you DO SOCIOLOGY, not study sociology. That is, you need to do some sort of research project, a THESIS. A THESIS is a paper which makes an assertion and backs that assertion with evidence. Since we are operating in a scientific discipline (or at least part of it aspires to be) the evidence must be empirical. For now think in terms of a long term paper (40 to 50 pages) focused on a specific issue with considerable empirical evidence. See What is a Thesis for more information. I will discuss these more later.

The "doing sociology" is circumscribed in many ways. Obviously you must be done this semester, (for deadlines see  Course Schedule - not yet posted). This limits the resources with which you can work. The areas of sociology from which the thesis may come are quite broad: some sort of social problem. The one main restriction--which will be explained below--is that the problem must be analyzed in a global-historical perspective. Finally, this is a seminar, which means that in addition to individual requirements (the thesis) there are COLLECTIVE requirements. A seminar is a regular meeting in which people interested in a topic come to discuss that topic in an informed, intellectual manner. This means coming prepared--having done the reading, and even more important having done some thinking. To come in UNprepared is to insult your classmates, the instructor, and the entire idea of senior seminar.

Seminar Policies & Attendance
I do not want to sound too harsh, but you must treat seminar as your most important class in all four years at DePauw. Every other class waits for it [not with respect to attendance, but with respect to which assignment you complete first, if you do not have time for all of them]. Among other things, because this class uses and helps you to use all the other classes you have taken. If everyone does come prepared seminar will be quite a bit of fun, and you will be able to "do" much of the work as part of class.  A successful seminar will help you cement together your entire major so it will stick with you and so you can use this knowledge throughout your life. The usual expectations for students also apply. See Professor Hall's Expectations for Students and himself.

Now, that should not be too bad. We will have "covered" most of the collective material in the first few weeks before midterms and papers are due in other classes. After that you will be working on your own project. You will schedule meetings with me as needed. Then, in late October we will resume meeting ALL together to start hearing results, critiquing, advising, clarifying, and finish with final presentations.

Attendance
Given both this structure, and that we meet only once a week. Attendance at all seminars is mandatory. This also means you must schedule other activities, such as job interviews, rush, social meetings, etc. around the seminar. There are NO excused absences (other than for "official university business" or bona fide religious observations,  when I am notified in advance IN WRITING OR BY EMAIL).  Keep in mind that missing one seminar is the same as missing an entire week of another class. During the presentations of theses we may run past 5:15 pm a bit [although I will try to avoid this] so plan on that now. 

Social Problems in Global-Historical Perspective
You have already received a preliminary description of the seminar. In order for a seminar to function as a seminar, it needs a topic. Why this is so will become very clear in the first few weeks. In terms of many of the capstone goals, what the topic is does not matter: as long as there is one, and that it is sociological!

I picked Social Problems in a Global-Historical Perspective for a variety of reasons:

• most important, this topic is sufficiently broad that it can accommodate each of you individual interests with sociology;
• "globalization" is on everyone's lips, now that the media and others have noticed a trend that has been going on for some time.  Underlying this, however, is a change in speed where the world IS becoming more interconnected.  In your lives, no matter what you do or where you live, knowing how to analyze problems globally will be a major asset for you throughout your life;
• many social problems are rooted in the social changes that have occurred in the last few centuries, and without historical depth, they cannot be properly understood -- to understand what something is changing INTO, you need to know something about what it is changing FROM;
• these are the reasons that I approach almost all sociology at a macro or global levels.   Because of this, I can best lead the seminar around these issues;
• students in past seminars consistently report they like this approach because it gives them leeway to pick a topic they are deeply concerned about;

The basic idea is to take ANY social problem -- you pick & define the problem and argue why it is a problem -- and place it in global perspective. A key point is defining and arguing why the problem is a social problem. Basically, you will need to research how the problem you pick is shaped, influenced, caused, reflects, or changes international and global forces, events, or processes. Or, rarely, why this is NOT so. How you do this will depend on the problem you pick to study. The readings and our discussions of them during the first part of the seminar will help set up several global perspectives. We will examine such processes as globalization (how things are becoming similar all over the world, or a bigmac is bigmac is a bigmac--no matter where you are), glocalization (how global processes manifest themselves locally, often in different forms), how & if the world-system is changing; how it is different from what came before. The readings will help you get started.

SOME POSSIBLE TOPICS:
Changing family structures
Changing labor force participation
Changing gender roles
Changing roles of indigenous peoples in the world
Changing nature/manifestation or racial and/or ethnic groups
Changing nature of social movements
Changing nature of poverty
Changing employment structures and how they affect race & gender relations
Colonization
Decolonization
Drug Trade
Drug Use
Ethnic Conflicts (in US &/or elsewhere)
Hunger: in the US or Globally
Immigration from the Third World
Migrations
Political Refugees
etc, etc, etc.

In short, you can address any topic you choose and place it in a global-historical context. The idea here, is to pull together everything you have learned about sociology and anthropology in a way that is meaningful to you by studying a problem that YOU argue is important to study.

In brief, there are two "assignments" for the seminar. First, to write a thesis on a social problem which puts that problem in a global-historical perspective, (or in rare cases explains precisely why a particular problem is NOT global, but only local). The second is to determine how to develop a theory of social problems that is global-historical in its scope.

Send comments or questions to tdhall@mail.colgate.edu
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