This course summarizes some of the new directions in Chinese history and social science produced by the creation and analysis of big historical datasets based on newly opened Chinese archival holdings, and organizes this knowledge in a framework that encourages learning about China in comparative perspective.

This course is a special edition of a course designed to 1) mediate the divide between the Arts and the Sciences; 2) introduce students new to anthropology aspects of culture theory and contemporary ecological/environmental anthropology; 3) forge a synthesis between culture theory and historical ecology; and 4) provide new insights on how human both fashion and are fashioned by their environments.

This course provides an overview of research methods in the social sciences. It is intended to provide a foundation for an understanding of the major approaches in the social sciences to the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, and the specification and testing of theories. The course covers the logic of scientific inquiry and various research techniques such as experimentation, scientific sampling, survey research, field methods, archival data, and quantitative analysis that are commonly used by researchers in economics, education, political science, psychology, and sociology.

This course examines what might be called “the Weber question”, namely, how, why, when, and to what extent did the West steal a march on the rest of the world and establish what has come to be seen as the foundations of modernity? This was Max Weber’s question, posed most powerfully and succinctly in his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. We will engage in a close reading of the Protestant Ethic and related texts to discern Weber’s argument. We will then evaluate his findings in the light of recent scholarship.

This course is intended as an introduction to contemporary Hong Kong. We will consider the city as a laboratory of social change: economic, political, social and cultural developments all have visible manifestations in the built environment and lived experience of the city. Hong Kong, as linked both to China and the world more generally, is a particularly good window on the complexities and contradictions of our current global moment.