New Social Science Sequences

The 2021-22 College Catalog is live, and it looks like they added a couple more Sosc sequences to the mix.

SOSC 17100-17200-17300. Religion: Cosmos, Conscience, and Community.
Religion: Cosmos, Conscience, and Community” investigates the contributions made by various religious traditions and literatures to the multiple, often competing ways in which human beings have explained the world, thought about existence, and theorized the human. This sequence asks students not simply to synthesize materials in a single intellectual tradition, but rather to think across traditions, identifying points of convergence and divergence. Students will wrestle with how religious ideas, discourses, and practices inform the construction of knowledge and the formation of modern social scientific inquiry. Finally, this shared exploration affords students the opportunity to ask what the social sciences can and do contribute to issues of pressing or even ultimate concern: How do societies conceptualize good and evil? What is to be done, individually and/or collectively, about suffering and injustice? What constitutes the “good” life? What can we hope for?

SOSC 18400-18500-18600. Democracy: Equality, Liberty, and the People’s Government.
The Democracy sequence examines democracy as it has been practiced around the world since its emergence over two and a half millennia ago. It considers democracy to be not only a particular kind of regime and politics organized around the principle of self-government, but also a kind of social order ostensibly defined by the operation of power among independent equals (sometimes conceptualized as the balance between liberty and equality). Rather than presume self-government and equal liberty to be universal ideals or accomplished realities, this sequence explores how their categorical assertion amid often drastic imbalances of social and political power has produced unequal outcomes and other unintended consequences. To grapple with the analytical challenge posed by democracy requires blending multiple modes of analysis—historical, comparative, institutional, social, political, cultural, conceptual, textual—to bring empirical evidence and theoretical frameworks into mutually reinforcing focus. In addition to the critical reading and analysis of texts traditional to general education at the University of Chicago, the Democracy sequence guides students in the fundaments of independent inquiry through assignments requiring library research and supporting intellectual habits that are essential to social-scientific inquiry and democratic citizenship.

More detail found here: Social Sciences < University of Chicago Catalog