Sociology 1900-5-N-SOC-WW
Some topics that will be covered:
1. How do we know what we know about the city?
2. The 15-minute city is a conspiracy? Where to get knowledge about the city?
3. Flaws in data or fallacies in reasoning?
4. Social autopsy. Did the 1995 heat wave in Chicago kill mostly the lonely and elderly?
5. Numbers and narratives. Are quantitative data objective and stories subjective?
6. Crime in cities is steadily increasing, right?
7. How does a neighborhood work and what do we need neighbors for?
8. The man who cost a million dollars. How much does homelessness cost?
9. How to study what you can't see? Hard-to-reach populations
10. How to do a survey to get the answer we want to get.
11. Ghetto and underclass, or integration and resilience. How to read stories about the city?
Type of course
Mode
Course coordinators
Assessment criteria
1. Attendance and actively taking part in discussions (max two voluntary absences).
2. Final essay will involve a selection of (social) media story on something happening in an urban environment and an investigation into its origin and truthfulness, tracing data sources, debunking false claims and analyzing rhetorical and visual tools that were used to present a certain story.
Practical placement
None.
Bibliography
Blokland, T. (2001). Bricks, mortar, memories: Neighbourhood and networks in collective acts of remembering. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), 268–283.
Blomley, N. (2007). How to turn a beggar into a bus stop: Law, traffic and “the function of the place.” Urban Studies, 44(9), 1697–1712.
Czekaj, K. (2007). Socjologia Szkoły Chicagowskiej i jej recepcja w Polsce. Górnośląska Wyższa Szkoła Handlowa.
Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city. Crown Publishing Group.
Duneier, M. (2004). Scrutinizing the heat: On ethnic myths and the importance of shoe leather. Contemporary Sociology, 33(2), 139–150.
Duneier, M. (2016). Ghetto: The invention of a place, the history of an idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gladwell, M. (2006, February 13). Million-dollar Murray: Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray
Harcourt, B. E., & Ludwig, J. (2006). Broken windows: New evidence from New York City and a five-city social experiment. The University of Chicago Law Review, 73(1), 271–320.
Harford, T. (2021). The data detective: Ten easy rules to make sense of statistics. Riverhead Books.
Hubbard, P., & Sanders, T. (2003). Making space for sex work: Female street prostitution and the production of urban space. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(1), 75–89.
Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Szum: Czyli skąd się biorą błędy w naszych decyzjach (P. Szymczak, Trans.). Media Rodzina.
Kaltenberg-Kwiatkowska, E. (2002). Sąsiedztwo we współczesnym mieście—stereotypy i rzeczywistość. In W. Misztal & J. Styka (Eds.), Stare i nowe struktury społeczne w Polsce (Vol. 3, pp. 255–280). Wydawnictwo UMCS.
Kiersztyn, A. (2008). Czy bieda czyni złodzieja? Związki między bezrobociem, ubóstwem i przestępczością. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
Klinenberg, E. (2002). Heat wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
Siemaszko, A. (Ed.). (2008). Geografia występku i strachu: Polskie badanie przestępczości '07. Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne.
Simmel, G. (2006). Mentalność mieszkańców wielkich miast. In Socjologia (pp. 513–531). Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. (Original work published 1908)
Stone, D. (2020). Counting: How we use numbers to decide what matters. Liveright.
Sturge, G. (2022). Bad data: How governments, politicians and the rest of us get misled by numbers. The Bridge Street Press.
Sułek, A. (2002). Ogród metodologii socjologicznej. Wydawnictwo Scholar.
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.
Venkatesh, S. A. (2013). Floating city: A rogue sociologist lost and found in New York's underground economy. Penguin Press.
Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Polity Press.
Wheelan, C. (2013). Naked statistics: Stripping the dread from the data. W. W. Norton & Company.
Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29–38.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: