Courses under this number involve pursuing graduate study in substantive sociological subfields. The courses presume familiarity with the fields of study. Consult departmental catalog for current descriptions.

The sociology of culture is one of the broadest and most fuzzily bounded of sociology's subfields. It is the subfield where sociologists confront the problem of meaning and how meanings are formed, organized, and communicated and thereby help form groups and predict patterns of behavior. It intersects with cognitive sociology, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of the arts and popular culture, religion, science, and the law. Moreover, cultural analysis has attained a prominent position in historical sociology, economic sociology, organizational sociology, the sociology of race and ethnicity, and social stratification. This means that while having a seminar in the sociology of culture makes sense "institutionally", it is intellectually odd because culture is less a distinct area of social life than an aspect of almost any phenomenon one might study. We begin by considering the various classical theoretical underpinnings of culture in sociology and its contemporary uses around the issues of cognition, identity, classification, meaning, and social change. We will then take up some of the main empirical uses of culture in various sociological subfields.

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