Workshops
Students in sociology are invited to participate in a program of Graduate Workshops in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, a series of interdepartmental discussion groups that bring faculty and advanced graduate students together to discuss their current work. Information about these many of these workshops is available at http://cas.uchicago.edu/.
Chicago faculty as well as outside speakers often present portions of books or other projects in which they are currently engaged while students frequently present portions of their dissertations and other research. Some examples of the workshops which draw students from sociology are:
Demography
This workshop is sponsored by the Committee on Demographic Training in collaboration with the Population Research Center of NORC and the University. Visitors from other campuses as well as Chicago faculty discuss current research activities in population studies. A current listing of events is available at: http://www.src.uchicago.edu/prc/events.html.
East Asia: Society, Politics, and Economy
This workshop focuses on current social science research on East Asian societies, including the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Presentations are by University faculty and advanced graduate students who conduct research on these societies.
The Workshop on Education
This interdisciplinary workshop alternates between two types of sessions: 1. Methodology and 2. New Findings in Education. The Methodology sessions focus on methodological problem solving and works in progress for individuals seeking guidance on methodological problems. The New Findings in Education section functions as a typical University of Chicago workshop with detailed discussions regarding student and faculty papers. Open discussion is encouraged after each workshop.
Gender and Sexuality Studies
This workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for the development of critical perspectives on gender and sexuality. Its primary purpose is to promote analyses of the ways in which these categories intersect with other practices, constructs, or systems of domination. In bringing together readings in queer and gender theory, workshop members will build a vocabulary and analytical tools to evaluate presentations with informed perspectives on how gender and sexuality theories inform and constitute one another. Graduate student presentations may focus on any area of gender and sexuality studies, with gender and sexuality understood as always already embedded in other social practices and categorizations. Workshop participants will share responsibility for choosing readings and speakers and for evaluating the effectiveness of the workshop's interdisciplinary process.
Social Theory
This workshop explores issues in social theory across a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The emphasis is less on developing social theory than on exploring in a sustained fashion the social theoretical implications of the participants’ work. Themes to be addressed are likely to include the relationship between social and cultural transformations; questions of the public sphere, civil society, and democracy; the relations between modernist and postmodernist forms of social theory; and conceptual issues posed by globalization.
Social Theory and Evidence
Social scientists continue to struggle over the relative merits of their many enterprises: explanation versus interpretation, causal versus descriptive analysis, the development of theories versus the testing of hypotheses. Two questions are foundational: What constitutes a good theory? And at what point does the evidence for an argument turn from plausible to compelling? These problems, present from the birth of social science, have grown no less thorny, but also no less critical, since how we choose to solve them informs the evidence we believe and the theories we generate. This workshop focuses on the clarity and cogency of social theories and the logic and effectiveness of evidence in social research.
The Sociology of Globalization
Transnational processes such as economic globalization confront the social sciences with a series of theoretical and methodological challenges. The workshop will attempt to go beyond international economic analyses focused on macro level cross-border flows and understand what it means to study globalization at other scales of analysis, down to the most detailed approache requiring fieldwork. See also the Globalization website - http://cas.uchicago.edu/scg/
Urban Social Processes
The USP workshop serves as a forum for those developing work and ideas in all areas of urban life, communities, and institutions. The main purpose of the workshop is to serve as an organizing site for works in progress, such as student dissertations and faculty research initiatives. It also provides a setting in which students may develop closer working relationships with faculty and other students who share their general interests in urban studies. The workshop hosts a lively and interactive series of both student and faculty presentations covering such topics as culture, political economy of place, crime, social organization, globalization, poverty, school leadership, health care, gentrification, and art in urban settings.
Immigration
Immigration-related issues cut across historical periods, generations, languages, and national boundaries. Who are those people who choose to migrate? Why do they migrate? How do immigrants and their families integrate into their new societies? How do immigrants influence their host societies? What kind of relationships do immigrants have with their countries of origin? The Immigration workshop provides a venue in which to address these and many other questions central to the academic and public debates on immigration.
