Majors
The selection of courses offered by the Sociology Department at Vassar can be seen as falling into six "clusters" – Theory, Inequality and Difference, Culture, Social Justice, Policy, and Globalization. Individual faculty members have placed their own classes in no more than two categories thereby providing an overall sense of courses that "go together." These clusters are not requirements nor are they intended as correlate sequences. They are designed to aid advisers and to help students make decisions about classes they may want to take. Still, these six categories can be used in various ways. Students concerned with a diverse selection of courses might want to choose classes that fall into different clusters, whereas students interested in a particular emphasis might take several courses within a single category. Either of these approaches could be useful in preparing sociology majors to write a senior thesis.
Curricular clusters enable students and faculty alike to conceptualize the coherence as well as the diversity, the depth and the breadth, of Sociology offerings at Vassar. We would stress, however, that it was not infrequently difficult to locate our own courses in only two "clusters" and that any given class almost certainly deals with matters that span several, perhaps even all, of these curricular categories.