0 or 3 credits
Fall 2025 Lecture Distance Learning Upper Division
This course uses television shows to explore sociological perspectives on culture. The premise of this class is that we can learn a great deal about how culture is constructed, shared, consumed, and contested from watching (and critically analyzing) television shows. We will read theoretical and empirical work about how culture is defined in the social sciences and some of the leading approaches to studying culture in sociology, and then use those concepts to analyze popular television shows. The study of culture centrally concerns the place of meaning in human life, and we will explore how television shapes and is shaped by culture. We will consider how signs, symbols, language, conceptual structures, forms of knowledge, and forms of power interact to create meaning in our life. Cultural change both produces and is produced by changes in meaning, and we will investigate how cultural change occurs, with a focus on topics like changes to American cultures of love, work, religion, and politics.
Learning Outcomes1Identify key concepts and theories central to the sociology of culture through readings and written responses.
2Explain how cultural change occurs and how power and inequality are central to the ways cultural norms change through papers and class discussions.
3Describe how television both reflects and shapes American culture through papers and class discussions.
4Apply concepts from sociology of culture to critically evaluate popular media through papers and workshops.
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