This popular introductory level course is taught every semester in both in person and online formats.  Students learn the skills to become claims makers and analyze the social construction of public issues from the point of view of activists, experts, media, public, policy makers, policy workers and evaluators. We explore class inequality, racism, sexual harassment and assault, immigration, fake news, COVID-19, housing and homelessness and other relevant public problems.

In this class we will look at a range of ways that groups of people come together into collective actions.   The course is organized around five key learning objectives.  Students will:

• Gain a sociological understanding of the study of both historical and contemporary social movements, including the range of key theories to explain social movement emergence.

• Understand structural and cultural conditions that (*sometimes*) give rise to social movements.

• Recognize motivations and obstacles to participation in social movement and contentious actions.

• Be able to identify dynamic processes and conditions that shape the evolution of contentious social movements.

• Appreciate the value of social movements including their impact on policy, culture and participants, as well as the socially constructed interpretations related to social movement ‘success.’

This new Fall 2022 course will look at reciprocal impacts society and the global climate crisis with particular attention to questions of environmental justice and actions that are and can be taken to both mitigate and adapt to the pending global climate crisis. Working in partnership withe City of Lowell on their Municipal Vulnerability Program grant, 24 students are conducting a tree survey to collect data that identifies urban heat islands.

Youth (or adolescence) constitutes a historically and socially constructed stage of the life course between childhood and adulthood. Since the early twentieth century, society's view of this life period has been ambivalent, at once glorifying the age of youth while also fretting over the problems that youth face. This course takes a sociological view of the study of youth/adolescence with particular attention to: (1) how this stage of the life course intersects with race, gender, immigration status and sexuality; (2) how society has responded to youth over time through a range of youth-serving organizations and media representations; and (3) how youth have responded as agents in their own public representations and development.

The overall purpose for Internships is to help students learn how to apply the sociological imagination to practical experiences as part of their internship at community-based organizations, government agencies, businesses and other professional settings.  Students will spend a total of 100 hours (about eight hours/week) working in an individually defined internship placement at an organization (“the placement”).   In addition, students will be assigned hands-on projects and readings that will facilitate learning in the internship placement settings.   Students will meet weekly as part of a seminar to reflect on their experiences in their internship placements while progressing through sociological readings that reflect organizational issues related to the internship placement.

Teams of advanced MPA students provide professional level consulting and research projects for public and non-profit organizations.

 A primary goal of this course is to understand sociological approaches to the study of immigration.  As sociologists, you will be expected to apply a scientific analysis of data to generate empirically-supported arguments in order to develop theories that explain behavior. 

Social Policy and Inequalities is a semester-long graduate seminar that analyzes the social policies in the United States and Massachusetts as they relate to persistent and structural inequalities in education, housing, health and healthcare access, workforce, and human services.   In this course, we will explore underlying sociological structural and cultural factors that contribute to inequalities based on class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality and disabilities, with attention to the intersectionality among these socially constructed status hierarchies.  During the first week, we will adopt a framework for critically analyzing key features of social policies that will allow us to critically interrogate and re-imagine polices.

This upper level undergraduate course will prepare students to analyze social welfare policies in the United States from a sociological perspective by providing them with the relevant historical background, conceptual tools, and research and interpretation skills. We will use both contemporary and historical policy examples to illustrate concepts and provide practical experience with policy analysis.