David has taught a range of courses including Development of Sociological Theory (UCLA), Introduction to Sociology, Methods of Empirical Investigation, Citizenship Matters, and International Migration. He has developed 3 courses that he is looking forward to teaching in the near future:
- Bound by Borders: A Sociology of Law and Migration. Laws bind people within a political jurisdiction to each other and to their territory. Geographically mobile people test these links and have been the cause for the emergence and reconfiguration of important laws governing who can come and go. How and why this happens interests not only policymakers, government officials and judges, but also individuals included or excluded by borders and scholars trying to understand laws. This mid-level course asks why migration laws differ among countries, how they change over time, and their impact on inequalities in receiving and sending countries. It considers explanations of the peculiar policymaking alliances that emerge in response to migration as well as of factors that shape the success of policy proposals. While the U.S. case receives extensive attention, the course takes a deliberately comparative perspective by analyzing the European Union, Asia, Latin America, the stateless and refugees.
- Members Only: A Political Sociology of Citizenship. Citizenship is fundamentally a legal tie between an individual and a particular state, and thus an inherently political institution. It is shaped and expressed primarily in three interdependent spheres: the state, markets, and civil society. The main objective of the seminar is to gain greater understanding of citizenship through the use of analytical tools developed in the subfield of political sociology. Readings come from that subfield, political philosophy, history, anthropology, and political science. Popular representations of citizenship in the media and film serve as windows into major analytic perspectives. By examining case studies in the Americas, Europe, and Asia over time, the course develops a comparative-historical approach to understanding citizenship.
- Global Perspectives on Race, Science and States. This mid-level course compares how the idea of race and the practice of sorting people by perceived race have varied over time in the Americas and globally. It also examines the ways in which people have used science to legitimate and advanced official racial classifications and policies. In particular, the course considers (1) the role played by state institutions like the census in reflecting and making racial categories, (2) the role of science in creating and giving its imprimatur to racial taxonomies, (3) the global spread of ethnoracial ways of classifying people as well as of “color-blind” ideologies of equality, and (4) new scientific claims about the “reality” of race.
