Course Offerings
I have three main pedagogical principles in my classes. First, I expect students to develop critical and analytical skills. Second, I think students bear the burden of the work. I understand my role as a teacher and mentor as a guiding one in their journey, providing engaging readings, posing questions, challenging assumptions, encouraging their quest for social justice. But they are the ones who have to do the job. Third, ongoing evaluation and adaptation of the syllabus; every semester I ask for feedback from students, TAs, and my own perception and adapt the classes according to that assessment.
I have structured most of my class with pre-, in-, and post-class assignments. Pre-class is the reading of the material before class. The in-class assignments intend to engage students more creatively: bringing pictures, or pieces of news related to the day discussion, or submitting a three sentences takeaway. The post-class are traditional essays that analyze all the readings related to a given topic. All classes have a final paper that is built in stages, to help the students to become familiar with sociological research. Students have partial submissions (topic, research question, literature review, fieldwork) and some drafts before the final version.
This course aims to introduce students to sociology while exploring inequality in Latin American societies, and the strategies Latin Americans create to deal with it. We discuss what sociology is, and focus on Latin American societies and their particularities. For that, we take some time to study pre-colonial and colonial times, independence wars, and the birth of modern Latin American nations. We learn about the main revolutionary and reformist movements in the twentieth century and the reactions against them.
Relying on this historical background, we then explore Latin American societies through sociological constructs such as race, gender, crime, religion, and culture. We pay attention to US-LA relations and Latinxs in the United States. I keep pushing the students to relate the topics we are discussing with the situation in their community.
It presents students with a basic sociological approach to religion in the United States, and how it interacts with ethnicity, gender, social class, and politics. We pay attention to historical developments and theological ideas, but the goal is to understand how do people live religion in their daily lives, and how that practice relates to other aspects of their social life.
I expect students will, at the end of the semester, have an informed sociological understanding of religion, will better understand how religion is present in their lives and in American social life.
The course is, basically, sociology of religion seminar. It addresses the following questions: What is going on with religion in our world? How do we understand religion? What is the role of religion in contemporary societies if any? During the semester, we explore current and classic answers to these questions.
We study what some “Founding Fathers” of sociology (Weber and Du Bois) had said, and the main theoretical frameworks to understand religion from a sociological perspective: Secularization and Rational Choice theories. We debate new trends in understanding religion in our globalized societies. The course covers quantitative and qualitative methodological perspectives as well as different geographical and cultural regions.
This course explores tattoos as a religious practice, from a sociological perspective. We start analyzing the relevance of tattoos in today’s society, and search how sociologists of religion have understood tattoos so far. Later, we study tattoos from a lived religion perspective. Students will explore the history of religious tattoos in the Western world, and the influences of other spiritual traditions on western tattoos. As many human creations, tattoos have also a ‘dark side’. They have been used as a tool of punishment. In that context, we will critically study religious mandates about tattoos.
We will investigate contemporary religious, spiritual tattoos in the U.S., the Americas and Europe. After paying attention to the role of tattooists, we will discuss who has the power to define if tattoos are religious practices or not.
This seminar explores the interaction between social changes and religion in Latin America. We study national cases, where we explore the political and religious changes in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Then, we investigate the interactions of religiosity with some social transformations (environmental and gender-related movements, marginality, and migration).
During the semester, the students will work on a paper about “religion and migration” among Latino immigrants to the U.S. After the course, students will be able to explain the origins, context, and consequences of religious transformation in Latin America, to develop their critical assessment of the role of religion in society, and to engage in a clear, concise and analytically sharp reading, writing and speaking.