Course info

This course examines race through the lens of social constructionist principles found in the writing of thinkers whose works contribute to Sociology, Social Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, and Critical Race Theory. These works define social constructs as concepts human societies develop to describe, categorize, and organize their physical world. The various description / categorization / organization processes societies undertake in constructing their social concepts result in the diverse range of social systems and institutions that operate in shaping humans' material realities across the globe. While societies often share social constructs, we see that the same social concepts produce varied forms of social systems / institutions depending on the specific cultural contexts of the societies implementing them. Understanding the fluid, context-specific nature of social constructs, this course seeks to examine not only how various societies apply social concepts to building their institutional systems (social constructionism), but also how institutional systems built on social constructs work in shaping the way humans define themselves and others in society (social constructivism).

The first part of this course will enable students to generate social constructionist analyses of race that examine the diverse and divergent ways it functions as a social category within the institutional systems of various societies around the world. The second part of this course will enable students to use autoethnographic research methodologies in generating social constructivist reflections on how societies' systematization of the racial concept in their social institutions works to shape how humans understand their identities, and the identities of others, in the world.