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Spring 2000 Social and Behavioral Studies (E104)
E104 Ballots and Bullets: Democratization and its Enemies (Gibson)
The world is democratizing. Over the past two
decades, more countries have changed from authoritarian regimes to
democracies than at any other time in history. This democratic wave has
swept across most of the globe: democratic transitions have occurred in
Europe, Africa, Latin America, South America, and Asia. This course provides
students the opportunity to explore the politics, economics, and social
effects of these modern transitions to democracy.
This course allows students to investigate the causes and consequences of
democratic transitions. Students will read and discuss current theories
regarding democratic transitions. These theories include explanations such
as culture, political institutions, economic institutions, wealth,
education, religion, the relationship between the military and the people,
and the nature of civil society. Students will apply these theories to a
number of cases where such transitions have succeeded and failed, in an
effort to analyze and evaluate the state of our understanding about
democracy and its genesis.
The course’s general orientation is discussion -- it is rare that a
"straight lecture" ever takes place. These discussions are
supported by homework involving reading and writing, group and individual
in-class assignments, and quizzes. The course is designed so that the mid
term and the final exams together account for a minority of the student’s final grade.
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E104 The Occult in Western Civilization (3 cr.) Grant
The occult is a theme that is deeply ingrained in the history of Western
civilization. From antiquity to the present, segments of our society have
laid claim to an esoteric wisdom that could only be revealed to those who
are worthy of its exercise. Such "occult" pursuits as alchemy,
astrology, and magic played an important role in the formation of modern
science during the scientific revolution of seventeenth century, and
subsequently had a major impact on poetry, music, and the pictorial arts.
And yet, if we consider the pursuits that are usually deemed to make up
"the occult," it is remarkable how little these fields have to do
with one another. What does alchemy, an artisanal pursuit related to
metallurgy, have in common with divinatory practices such as astrology,
oneiromancy, or crystal-gazing? What does witchcraft have to do with
extraterrestrial life? The Occult in Western Civilization will answer these
questions and others. It will also argue that the occult sciences -
especially alchemy, astrology, and natural magic-were originally predicated
on quite reasonable bases consistent with the best science and philosophy of
their time, however they may have been altered in late twentieth-century
culture. By thinking carefully about the relationships among science,
philosophy, and those disciplines traditionally classified as
"occult" students will learn about the nature of scientific
knowledge more generally.
The basic goals of the course, then, will be to instill a historical
understanding of the occult while at the same time stimulating philosophical
reflection on the nature of scientific knowledge in general. The student
assignments will be based on material used for the class, such as
demonstrations, experiments, and discussions. In the weekly discussion
sessions, the students will be responsible for answering a set number of
questions handed out in advance and based closely on the readings and
lectures. Three major exams will be given during the course relating to the
questions discussed during the sessions. In addition, a set number of other
assignments will be handed out, such as the interpretation of astrological
horoscopes.
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E104 The Mad and the Bad (Dwyer)
The chronic mentally ill and career criminals are perceived by many as
frustratingly intractable social problems. This course considers both those
labeled "mad" and those labeled "bad," as well as the
ways in which the criminal justice and mental health systems respond to the
mad and the bad. It also looks at how people move (and are moved) back and
forth between jails and hospitals, prisons and psychiatric forensic units.
Specific topics will include schizophrenia, homelessness, the insanity and
incompetency legal pleas, criminal careers, psychopathy and serial killers,
recovered memory syndrome, and violent sexual offender legislation.
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E104 Sex, Technology, and Power (J. Robinson)
How should sex education be taught? Why is abortion politically
controversial in the United States but not a major issue in most other
countries? Who and what influences government decisions about whether
65-year-old women should use reproductive technology to have children? What
are the ethics of surrogacy? What are the political issues lurking behind
that age-old question: who owns a man’s sperm? Why is AIDS a political
issue? What is the relation between religion and politics when sexual issues
are legislated?
In this course, you will have the opportunity to examine these questions
in light of politics in the countries of the Americas, Europe, Asia and
Africa. Readings will be based on the United States but lectures and class
discussions will present information and perspectives from other countries.
The 6 major issues we will examine are: sex education, contraception,
abortion, assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and AIDS. In addition to written
texts, we will use films, expert speakers, and discussion and debate. There
will be regular quizzes and writing assignments, but no final exam. There is
however a final research paper and a group project.
Requirements:
- Do all the readings. Quizzes and class discussions as well as projects
will depend on your having read and thought about the reading
assignments.
- Participate in class discussion. About one-third of class time
will be spent having small group discussions, debates, and other forms
of oral and written participation.
- Take all quizzes and complete all short paper assignments .
- Participate in a group project. Projects will examine how various
groups use their power to influence decisions about sexuality and
technology.
- Write a 5 page paper on one of the 6 issues we discuss in class. The
paper must be a formal, typed research paper, with footnotes/endnotes, a
thesis, and a conclusion.
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E104 Japan's Economic Miracle (Kasza)
Thus far Japan is the only non-Western country to take its place among
the world's fully industrialized democracies. This course explores many
dimensions of Japan's economic success. These include the pattern of
economic development, techniques of factory management, the employment
system, the role of women, government policy, and the impact of foreign trade.
Scholars have offered various interpretations of Japan's success. Some
believe that the legacy of the past gave Japan a head start in the race for
economic growth. Others argue that the cultural values of the Japanese, such
as their strong sense of hierarchy and group orientation, deserve most of
the credit for the economic "miracle" of the late twentieth
century. Another approach is to treat Japan's success as the achievement of
politicians and business people who provided astute leadership and built
effective institutions. A final school attributes Japan's success to a
supportive international environment, including such factors as the U.S.
nuclear umbrella and the availability of foreign technology. Throughout the
course, we will grapple with these contradictory interpretations as we study
Japan's political economy.
Written work for the course will include a term paper, two short quizzes,
and a mid-term and final exam.
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E104 Law and Order in Cyberspace (Herbert)
Social life is increasingly taking place on line. Electronic mail,
bulletin boards, discussion groups, on-line shopping, and multi-user
dungeons are all becoming a part of many people’s everyday activities.
Given the pace of technological change, this is a trend that will continue
for the foreseeable future.
It is unclear, at this point, just how different life in cyberspace will
be from life in the "real" world. One area of increased attention,
however, is the challenge of regulating deviant and criminal behavior
on-line. Concerns about child pornography, hacking, copyright infringement,
fraud, and the loss of privacy fuel heated debates about the future of
cyberspace and its control.
In this course, we will address a central question—How can order be
created in the growing world of cyberspace? We will address this question in
three steps. First, we will examine social order and investigate how it is
created, in both formal and informal ways. Second, we will explore the world
of cybersociety, and consider how it is similar to and different from life
in the "real" world. Third, we will consider some of the more
significant examples of wrongdoing in cyberspace and investigate the
challenges the legal system faces in trying to respond to those activities.
In so doing, we will consider questions of fundamental consequence to
democratic societies, including the right of government agencies to restrict
free expression.
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E104 Indiana Dialects & Language Variation (Botne)
Language differences are inevitable in a society composed of numerous
social and ethnic groups. These differences in language serve as one of the
most obvious indicators of social and regional variations. Consequently,
they affect the impressions we have of those we meet around us every day. In
this course students will consider what it means to talk about dialects in
general and Indiana dialects in particular. One focus throughout the course
will be the speech of young adults in Indiana: how it might be investigated,
how it differs from that identified in other studies, whether current
dialect differences match former dialect boundaries.
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E104 Gender, Crime, and Violence (Beckett)
In this course, we will explore the ways in which gender shapes the
perpetration, experience, and response to crime, especially violent crime.
The course will be organized around the following questions: how does gender
affect patterns of criminality? Why, in our culture, are men more
willing to engage in crime than women? How does gender shape the experience
of crime and violence? Finally, how does gender—especially beliefs about
how men and women should and should not act affect
the way society responds to different types of violence?
The course has three main sections. In Part I we will discuss what gender
is and how it shapes our experience of the social world. The main objective
of this section of the course is to explore whether and how cultural conceptions
of masculinity and femininity shape our
identities, experiences, and opportunities. In Part II, we will explore the
ways in which gender informs confrontations between men, urban "street
crime," rape, family violence, and female criminality.
The main questions we will explore are: why are men more likely than women
to commit violent crimes? How does gender shape which crimes men and women
commit and how they perpetrate them? How are the various types of violence
mentioned above "gendered," that is, shaped by gender? In Part III
we will analyze the way in which gender (and race and class) shape the
social and legal response to crime and violence.
Throughout the course, we will focus on the development of important
skills and capacities. These skills include identifying and evaluating
arguments, comparing and applying theoretical approaches, analytical
thinking, developing and supporting arguments, and many others. Each of the
assignments will be oriented toward the development of these skills. Exams
will consist primarily of essay questions.
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E104 The Rise and Fall of Ancient Civilizations (Conrad)
About 10,000 years ago, human societies in several areas of the world
began to undergo a series of major transformations. Small groups of hunters
and gatherers settled into the world’s first farming villages. From these
villages arose bigger towns, and eventually large and complex urban
civilizations.
How and why did these changes take place? In what ways were the early
civilizations similar to one another? How did they differ from one another?
What do these similarities and differences tell us about the nature of
civilization and the state, culture change, and human society itself? This
course addresses such questions through an introductory survey of five
ancient civilizations: the Sumerians and Egyptians in the Old World and the
Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas in the New World. Lectures, readings, and
discussion sections describe and compare these civilizations and consider
the ways in which their growth and decline were shaped by environment,
technology, trade, warfare, religious beliefs, and other phenomena. Some of
the discussion sections provide hands-on exercises that introduce basic
principles and methods of archaeological research.
The goal of E104 is not to provide final answers to the questions posed
above. (At present there are none.) Rather, the goal is to introduce
students to the ways in which major questions in social and historical
studies are investigated and debated. The course also aims to teach critical
thinking skills. Students are asked to weigh competing points of view
against the available data and develop the strongest arguments they can to
support their own interpretations.
There are two lectures and one discussion section per week. Grades are
based on four short (3-5 page) essays and a take-home final exam
(essentially a fifth essay). For more information see the course Web site:
http://www.indiana.edu/~mathers/ancient/
[Note: the Web site currently shows the 1998-99 syllabus. In 1999-2000 I
will be using Lamberg-Karlovsky and Sabloff 1995 as the primary text,
eliminating Essay #3, increasing the length of Essay #1 to 3-4 pages,
increasing the length of the other essays to 4-5 pages, and adjusting the
schedule of assignments. These changes reflect suggestions made by last
year's students.]
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E104 Gender and Sexuality in American History (3 cr.) Gamber
This is NOT a course about "naked people," as BC Magazine once
described an earlier version. Instead, it is a course that combines
conventional historical topics with unconventional themes. "Gender and
Sexuality in American History" examines how gender (the roles various
societies assign to men and women or what scholars call the "social
construction" of masculinity and femininity), and attitudes toward
sexuality (sexual behavior) influenced selected issues and events in
American history. (These will include the European "discovery" and
settlement of America, the American Revolution, the Civil War and
Reconstruction, the rise of big business, the Cold War, and recent political
conservatism). We'll consider the relevance of issues that we often think of
as "private" to political and economic history. We might find out,
for example, that concerns about gender and sexuality had quite a bit to do
with the Founding Fathers' ideas about American politics and
government. We will examine sources such as visual images, songs, novels,
and films in order to understand how Americans themselves viewed the
relationship between gender and sexuality, on one hand, and political,
social, and economic events, on the other.
You will be required to attend twice weekly lectures, to attend and
participate actively in weekly discussion sections, and to complete assigned
reading (and in some cases, viewing). You will complete very brief ungraded
weekly writing assignments, and expand two of them into short, 3-5-page papers.
You will also have a midterm and a final, both of which will be in essay format.
All assignments will encourage you to connect issues presented in
lecture to readings, illustrations, and films.
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E104 Evolution, Society and Religion(Lloyd)
Elections, wars, and plagues pale in importance aside the development of
two philosophical trends: The rise of modern science and the development of
contemporary religion. Together these movements have
shaped the western world since the time of the Reformation and the
Scientific Revolution. They are now reshaping the entire world beyond
recognition even to your grandparents. Equally important these two movements
have shaped and continue to shape each other.
This Topics course will focus on the century between 1840 and
1940. A time when science and religion vied with one another for the mind
and hearts of the western world. You will be taken into the thick of the
fray and asked to follow the struggles and accommodations between theories
of biological evolution, and the ever changing Christian tradition. The
weekly lectures will introduce you to some of the particulars of the
interaction of these two movements and to how historians today interpret it.
You will be asked to read selections from the writings of the period. You
will be asked to view many sides of the complex questions that were being
debated. There will be weekly or biweekly discussion sections in
which you will explore in smaller groups the issues presented in lectures
and the reading selections. There will be section quizzes, an in-class and a
final exam, which will cover this same material.
The most valuable experience, however, might well be the research paper
you will be asked to write. In short, you will be asked to
understand the ideas and concerns of an historical individual as he or she
wrestled with some of the same issues you will face in class and the
assigned readings. Since this may well be the first College paper you will
write, you will receive guidance into the resources of the IU library
system. You will learn the techniques of finding relevant material for you
individual documents, and you will be given plenty of opportunity to develop
your own interpretation of the material you discover. You will write several
drafts before handing in the final paper.
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E104 Divided Lives: Women and Men at Home and at Work (Walters)
Men's and women's responsibilities used to be clear: men took care of
work, women took care of the family. Rapid social changes in the U.S. have
consigned this "traditional family" to the dustbin of history, but
new, workable models have not emerged for both women and men to combine work
and family responsibilities. At present many adults experience conflicts
between work and families, and in many families there are conflicts,
sometimes intense ones, between the division of work and family
responsibilities.
This course has three goals. The first is to explore how the organization
of family life in our society in general (who takes care of the kids?; how
available and affordable is childcare?; what social services are available
to support families?) is affected by and in turn affects the organization of
the workplace (how unequal are women's and men's incomes?; is part-time work
available?; what family benefits do employers provide?). In brief, we will
examine the social-structural context in which the divisions and conflicts
in individual people's lives are played out. The second goal is to connect
this social-structural context with the work and family experiences of
individual women and men. How do people think about the choices in their own
lives? How do women's choices affect men's, and vice-versa? The final goal
is to describe and analyze a variety of public and private attempts to
modify the work-family linkage, primarily ones that are intended to make it
easier to work and care for a family.
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E104 Freedom of Speech in the United States (McGregor)
Contrary to what some may believe, the protection of free speech by the
First Amendment is not absolute. Government attempts to punish or restrict
certain kinds of speech all the time, and sometimes when those restrictions
are challenged in court, the court approves of the restrictions. After
taking this course, you’ll understand why this happens in a country that
supposedly guarantees free speech.
We’ll start the course by reading some of the philosophers that first
spoke about the benefits of free speech, and then we’ll look at some of
the contemporary criticisms of the concept. Next, we’ll study most of the
exceptions to free speech in the United States, including speech that
creates a clear and present danger of lawless action, obscene speech, and
speech that violates another person’s privacy. Throughout the course you’ll
practice your analytical abilities and critical thinking skills by applying
what you’ve learned about free speech to new situations. For example,
based on what you learn about restricting speech on a radio station, how
would the government react to the same speech on the internet?
Class instruction includes lecture, guest speakers, pertinent videotapes,
and discussion. During the class, you’ll write several in-class
"pop" essays plus two research papers on a free-speech topic of
interest to you. You’ll also do at least one oral exercise such as a
debate or a moot court argument. The course concludes with a comprehensive
final examination.
After taking this course, you’ll understand the boundaries of free
speech in the United States. More importantly, you’ll be able to
critically assess government attempts to restrict free speech in the future.
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E104 War and Cross-Cultural Relations (M. Robinson)
This course examines the impact of three 20th century wars on
the cultural and political relations between the U.S. and East Asia. The
purpose of the course is to understand how our violent encounters with Japan
in World War II, with China and North Korea during the Korean War, and with
the Vietnamese between 1960-1975 have shaped mutual perceptions of culture,
race, and gender. Rather than consider war from "strategic,"
national interest, or geo-political standpoints, we will consider how war
shapes interpersonal contact between war’s fighting participants and
ordinary people---particularly women and children.
These 20th century wars have brought literally hundreds of
thousands of U.S. men (and women) in contact with the people of East Asia
for the first time. Contact mediated by the extraordinary conditions of war’s
destruction, social dislocation, cultural trauma, and physical violence have
left lasting impressions on the peoples of our very different societies.
Therefore, this contact has constructed skewed cultural and racial
perceptions. We will study how these perceptions of the experience of war
shape our own understanding of East Asia as well as the nature and meaning
of war for ourselves.
In the course of this study, we will also pick-up a broad understanding
of the historical narrative of East Asia in the 20th
century---its culture, politics, social structure, and values. We will use
non-traditional sources for this study: feature films, literature, comic
books, documentaries, as well as more traditional texts. We intend that the
use of such texts and the intense study of these emotional issues will
stimulate you to further deepen your interest in Asia in general.
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Language and Gender (Auger)
This course is about language and gender: how women and men use
language and how language reflects the status of women and men in society.
Many people have specific ideas about the way women speak: women are more
polite than men and they speak better than them, they talk and gossip more
than men, they use expressions like kind of and seek approval for what they
say by making their statements sound like questions or by adding tag
questions: It’s a nice day, isn’t it? In this course, we will ask
ourselves whether any of the stereotypes about women’s language are true.
We will try to determine how differently women and men really speak and
understand why this should be the case. We will examine gender differences
in various cultures and seek to establish whether the differences are
genetic or social. We will also examine claims that English and many other
languages are sexist and that they deny women a level of recognition equal
to men’s. For example, is the use of masculine pronouns (he, him, his) and
words such as mankind in passages that are supposed to refer to females and
males really gender-inclusive? Is there any need to change language and make
it more gender-neutral?
The primary goal of this course is to engage students in a critical
examination of the various ways in which language and gender interact so
they become able to tell apart myth from reality. A second but very
important goal is to teach students to do research. Consequently, students
will be required to work in small groups and conduct an empirical study on
one aspect of language and gender that interests them particularly.
Requirements for the course include (1) a diary in which students record
observations on language and gender and reflect on them, (2) critical
evaluations of popular and scientific articles, and (3) a group research
paper. Regular attendance is required and will be encouraged through pop quizzes.
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