Cultural Sociology ~ Sociology 4850

Cultural Sociology is a 4th year seminar course and was described in this way on the Fall 2023 course outline: In this reading and writing intensive upper-level advanced seminar in cultural sociology and cultural theory we will examine knowledge, art, music, literature, social media, and other relevant topics from a sociological perspective. Questions that guide this class include: What is culture? How is it created? How is it represented? How does culture shape reality? How does culture reflect reality? Why does it matter? Towards this end, our class is separated into three sections. The first section focuses on defining culture, knowledge, and being. We examine several definitions of culture and then move toward a discussion of consciousness and knowledge. The second section focuses on examining four different cultural models for analyzing culture: art worlds, cultural fields, diasporas, and labour/maintenance. In the third and final section, we focus on cultural representations (art, cinema, and the internet) and how these cultural representations simultaneously shape and/or reflect realities. Of particular interest are the ways in which cultural producers and cultural forms reinforce and/or challenge the reproduction of social inequalities in society.