Spring 2017  |  SOC 3311W Section 001: Hard Times & Bad Behavior: Homelessness & Marginality in the United States (67167)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017
Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 12:30PM
UMTC, West Bank
Blegen Hall 415
Course Catalog Description:
As we read about hobos and sailors, opium users and saloon girls, and contemporary experiences on the streets, we trace themes about marginality in the US, such as rootlessness produced by labor market, the love-hate relationship between elites and marginal populations in popular culture, and the complex mixture of freedom and deprivation of people on the edge. prereq: 1001 recommended, soc majors/minors must register A-F
Class Notes:
Click on this link for more detailed information: http://classinfo.umn.edu/?tgowan+SOC3311W+Spring2017
Class Description:
A cultural approach to homeless and marginality in the United States Please read carefully! (1) Please be aware that this class may differ considerably from what you might expect from the subject matter. This is neither a "social problems" nor criminology class, ?The homeless? and ?homelessness? are not approached as ?problems? from a policy perspective. Instead we trace the recurring mobility and placenessness of the very poor as a core element of the historical experience and cultural imaginary of the United States. (2) It will be helpful to have taken Soc 3701 Social Theory or similar theory classes which give you an introduction to the core ideas of Marx and Foucault. Hard Times and Bad Behavior examines several zones of US "low life" through the first-person accounts of impoverished Americans themselves, as well as those of the reformers, academic experts, authors, and musicians who have interpreted, analyzed, or condemned them. Reading about hobos, "street arabs," saloon girls, and reformers we will trace some enduring themes. Examples are the rootlessness produced by the American labor market, the love-hate relationship between elites and marginal populations in popular culture, and the complex mixture of freedom and deprivation experienced by people living on the edge. In a typically complex mixture of structural constraint and cultural agency, migration and transience have represented both terrible dispossession and a certain liberation for homeless Americans. Often forced to move by unemployment, penal and relief systems, they made worlds of their own. Our historical study of the cultural, economic and political aspects of homelessness and related forms of marginality takes us through topics such as great tramp scare, the homeless orphans and street prostitutes of old New York, the hobo phase of the "Wobblies" (the IWW), Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp," the mass street and shanty homelessness of Great Depression, and the return of large-scale homelessness in the neoliberal era and the Great Recession. We study both the different ways elites and ?experts? have represented, pathologized, and managed the very poor in different eras, and the simultaneous cultural mining of both homelessness and drug use by the Beats, Bob Dylan, punks, and other strands of US counterculture. The course will develop students? theoretical toolkits, using insights from the Marxian tradition (particular on how poverty is shaped by shifting economic and class structures over time), the Birmingham school of cultural studies, as well as Foucauldian work on social control and deviance. This class takes its writing-intensive designation seriously! We will spend plenty of class time working with drafts and learning skills to improve your descriptive and analytical writing. My aim is to increase not only your skill level but your pleasure in self-expression.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/67167/1173
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
27 October 2014

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