Overview
Papers: The paper will test your ability to analyze theoretical arguments. You will turnin a short, roughly two-to-three-page response paper that addresses the readings of that theme.Please include at the top of your paper the question you will be answering in the paper.
Your paper should include an introduction, which lays out the argument and the ways you will demonstrate the correctness of your argument, body paragraphs, which will follow the path you lay out in the introduction to prove your argument, and a conclusion, which will summarize the claims previously made and draw out their logical implications. Please do not include a quotation from a dictionary as the definitive proof of the meaning of a key term. Words change their meaning over time. Citations and Sources: Every single idea that you reference that is not your own and every piece of information you cite must have a footnote or endnote. These citations must include the page number(s) where you found that particular idea or piece of information. Footnotes or endnotes should come at the end of the sentence. If you cite more than one source in a single sentence, you should include the source for each piece of information or idea in a single footnote in the order that they appear in the sentence. I realize that in sociology you often use parenthetical citations. I ask that you use footnotes, however, because several of the books that we have read have been published many times and when I see, for example (Marx, 1978, p. 75), it tells me very little about what text you are reading. I strongly encourage you to use the footnotes and endnotes function in the insert menu in MS Word for Mac, in the insert menu for Googledocs, or in the references menu in MS Word for Windows, instead of trying to format the footnote yourself. I expect your citations to be in a “history” format from the Turabian format in the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). After you have cited a source for the first time, you may use the shortened forms described in the CMS. If you fail to cite the source for your information or ideas that are not your own, you will receive points off. If cite no sources, you will receive no points for the paper. If you cite no course readings, you will receive 75% of the possible points. Unless the source is for an institution that conducts serious research (like NASA) or a contemporary news article used to address a contemporary topic, I will treat all citations of websites as non-citations. If you cite a source not from the course readings, it must come from an academic press or a peer-reviewed journal.
Theoretical Reading
Moore, Jason W. "Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times: Accumulation & Crisis in the Capitalist World Ecology." Journal of World-Systems Research 17, no. 1 (2011): 107-46.
Theoretical Reading
Foster, John Bellamy. "Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology." American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 366-405.
Gateway Reading
Theoretical Reading
Foster, John Bellamy. "Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Postexemptionalist Sociology." American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 6 (2012): 1625-73