Course Spotlight: Sociology of Taste
Are you still looking to add a fall 2018 class to your schedule? Connor Fitzmaurice will be teaching our Special Topics course, The Sociology of Taste (MET ML 610 D1) on Thursday evenings.
Taste has an undeniable personal immediacy: producing visceral feelings ranging from delight to disgust. As a result, in our everyday lives we tend to think about taste as purely a matter of individual preference. However, for sociologists, our tastes are not only socially meaningful, they are also socially determined, organized, and constructed. This course will introduce students to the variety of questions sociologists have asked about taste. What is a need? Where do preferences come from? What social functions might our tastes serve? Major theoretical perspectives for answering these questions will be considered, examining the influence of societal institutions, status seeking behaviors, internalized dispositions, and systems of meaning on not only what we enjoy–but what we find most revolting.
MET ML 610 D1, Special Topics in Gastronomy: Sociology of Taste, will meet on Thursday evenings from 6 to 8:45 PM, beginning on September 6. Registration information can be found here.