Explores urban space and urban issues through the lens of hip hop culture. Topics include public space and the arts, race and identity, gender and sexuality, crime and policing, and globalization and the global city. Traces the origins of hip hop in the US while using Toronto as a laboratory to understand the relationship between […]
Cities face many challenges, but climate change presents some of the most urgent demands on governance, policy, and planning cities have ever experienced. Social inequalities are heightened in crises and are often determinative of success or failure in survival. This course examines the concept of resilience, asking how cities can pursue resilience in a context […]
Provides a basic understanding of the statistical reasoning and fundamental statistical techniques frequently used to analyze social data. It introduces students to the uses of computers and statistics in the social sciences. It helps develop necessary critical skills to evaluate empirical research.
This course examines the notion of responsibility in the context of complex constellations of global injustice for which attributions of individual responsibility/blame are contested. Term one equips students with theoretical approaches from philosophical, literary and historical “classics” which contain different approaches to responsibility. These inform the applied material of term two on the role of […]
This course takes an interdisciplinary social scientific approach to the study of finance in contemporary society. It explores the process of financialization from the late 1970s until present, along with the social impact of this shift in economic organization. It critically engages with the language of finance, decoding terminology relating to financial markets, pensions and […]
This course focuses on the business and management implications of environmental change in both the Global South and Global North. Concepts and tools covered in the course identify and measure impacts of production and other economic activities such as ecological degradation, resource depletion, adverse effects on human health, and other externalities.
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of law and games of all sorts: from tag, to sports, to online games. It explores what games teach us about legal processes, and what the study of law reveals about the dynamics of games. Students will use socio-legal approaches to examine game-related topics and their cultural, […]
We are a culture fascinated with the concept of “madness.” The mad person has been simultaneously represented in popular culture as genius, artistic, comedic and dangerous. There is something profoundly stable about the historical positioning of individuals identified as mentally 'disordered' at the outer boundaries of Canadian social and political life. This interdisciplinary course traces […]
Today, concepts of wellness and wellbeing prevail in both popular and medical discourses about health. But what do these concepts really mean? When, how, and why have they come to predominate so centrally in our culture, as well as various institutional settings (such as schools, workplaces, prisons)? How do these paradigms shape our understanding of […]
This course explores critical health issues in the Global South and its relationship to the political economy of development. It analyses the socio-economic systems, the morbidity-mortality patterns, the demographic and epidemiological transitions and the triple burden of health problems in developing countries. Special attention is given to the study of comparative Health Systems in Latin […]