2025

The following courses are approved courses for FA25 for those pursuing a graduate certificate in Social Theory (listed alphabetically). This list is not final, and courses may be added up to the beginning of the Fall semester. 

GWS 600/ST 600: Masculinities (3 credits)
Instructor: Elizabeth Williams, Rusty Barrett
Day & Time: Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 pm
Location: Breckinridge Hall 107
Course Description: An advanced multidisciplinary seminar in social theory for graduate students taught by a team of faculty members. Topics change from year to year; examples include: individual and society, the social construction of gender, modernity and postmodernity, space and time in social life, objectivity and its other, etc. Focus is on the cross-disciplinary investigation of such issues in the social sciences and humanities. May be repeated to a maximum of nine credits under different subtitles.

GWS 700: Topical Seminar in GWS: Studying the Right (3 credits)
Instructor: Carol Mason
Day & Time: Mondays, 3:00-5:30 pm
Location: Fine Arts Library 311
Course Description: Right-wing studies is a bourgeoning transnational endeavor across disciplines inspired by the recent global rise in authoritarian populism. However, analyzing the right has history that graduate students need to know. This class will provide students with: current discussions and definitions of key terms; a historical background to studying the right by focusing on important centers and the archives they’ve created in the United States; and a survey of methodological approaches and the kinds of analyses they produce. Assignments will emphasize understanding arguments and methods rather than producing original research and analysis. Readings are likely to include books by Daniel Martinez Hosang, Joseph Lowndes, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Kathleen Blee, Carlos De La Torre, Pete Simi, Robert Futrell, Matthew Lyon, Chip Berlet, Agnieszka Graff, Luke Mogelson, Larry Rosenthal, Jeff Sharlet, Kathleen Belew, and others.

PHI 500: Philosophy of Social Science (3 credits)
Instructor: Ted Schatzki
Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00-3:15pm
Location: Funkhouser Building B9
Course Description: The course is an advanced introduction to philosophy in and of social science. It aims to illuminate key philosophical dimensions of the study of social life. Among the questions it will address are: Do the phenomena that social science studies have a basic structure?, Why is this enterprise usually called social ‘science’?, What does it seek to achieve?, What are the important conceptual issues and ways of thinking that shape its work?, and What are its roles in society? To explore these questions, the course will address such topics as the constitution of social phenomena, the cognitive and practical aims of social investigation, the determinants of human activity, explanations of social changes, whether social science is like natural science, the theoretical dimension of social inquiry, and relations among social science, social critique, and social practice. Attention will also be paid to questions of method and how methods reflect positions on the above questions and issues.

PHI 680/ST 500: Social Construction in Contemporary Philosophy (3 credits)
Instructor: Julie Bursten
Day & Time: Mondays, 4:00-6:30pm
Location: Patterson Office Tower 1445
Course Description: Contemporary movements across philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, and more have increasingly recognized the need to reckon with social reality, that is, the myriad ways in which human social dynamics impact philosophical understanding of the nature(s) of reality and the structure(s) of knowledge, both everyday and scientific. Observations and insights about social reality touch on a wide variety of subjects, from the role of human perceptive faculties in determining foundational natural categories and the complex sociological systems underlying  conceptualizations of gender to interpreting quantum theory and impacting science policy. Likewise, philosophers have incorporated social reality into theoretical frameworks in many distinct, and occasionally incompatible, ways. In this seminar, we will explore how social structures, beliefs, actions, and institutions shape and constrain philosophical projects across contemporary philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. We will begin by reading Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (Harvard University Press: 2000), and proceed through a survey of more recent philosophical movements in social construction before turning to topics selected on the basis of class interest. This course satisfies the Contemporary Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for graduate students in the Philosophy Ph.D. program.