3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

The schools that children attend and the neighborhoods in which they live are critically important sites of mental and physical development, socialization, and academic achievement. These contexts in which children live and learn are also highly segregated by race and class, resulting in spatially stratified opportunities for social mobility – what social scientists call “the geography of opportunity.” This course explores social inequality through the lens of space, place, and geography, with a particular focus on how these dynamics shape educational inequality in the United States. Drawing on readings from sociology, demography, psychology, history, economics, urban planning, and public health, this course will teach students to think critically about how individual choices and public policies interact with dynamics of space and place to create and maintain social inequality.