field of study. halp?

[g0ssamer]

every time i talk to my advisors, they tell me to look at a course catalog and pick out all the classes that look interesting to me. i've done that and come up with a list of 60 classes, though i could easily come up with a list of 200. i went in to talk to another advisor on friday, and he said to pick the 20 classes i would want to take the most, more than anything else ever. that's really hard to do and i'm not sure i did a good job, but here are my 20 classes. watch me continually update this list as the weekend goes on. any advice about what i should take or themes that you see would be welcome.

American Studies 101 - Atomic Age and Cold War Culture - "How people use and respond to the rhetoric of progress and annihilation in the United States"

Anthropology 139 - Controlling Processes
Anthropology 156b - Culture and Power

German C109 - Language and Power
German 160b - Facism and Propaganda (in Nazi Germany)

Legal Studies 160 - Punishment, Culture, and Society
Legal Studies 181 - Psychology and the Law
Legal Studies 182 - Politics, Law, and Society
Legal Studies C184 - Sociology of Law
Legal Studies 187 - Discrimination, Law, and Inequality

Political Science 164a - Political Psychology and Involvement
Political Science 181/183 - organizational and administrative behavior

Public Policy 103 - Wealth and Poverty

Psychology 160 - Social Psychology
Psychology 163 - Small Group Structure and Processes
Psychology 166ac - Cultural Psychology

Rhetoric 150 - Rhetoric of Contemporary Politics
Rhetoric 162ac - Myth and Culture in American History

Sociology 115 - Deviance and Social Control
Sociology 156 - Thought Reform, Influence, and Social Control

i guess i'm seeing threads of power and control, but there's also threads of law, rhetoric, and psychology somewhat randomly thrown in. enh, i donno. time to ... think about this later.

but some research topics i'm generally interested in include:

• polyamory
  
  • why most mainstream people won't take it seriously
  • what it says about our society that it exists at all
  • why there are weird dynamics between poly people of different ages
  • its historical context and relation to the LGBT movement
• bathroom graffiti as a reflection of society (moreso in the women's than men's restroom)
  
  • it shows what people are too vulnerable or unwilling to talk about in real life; it's a true reflection of what people are thinking.
  • so it reflects people's innermost fears, desires, discriminatory beliefs, political views, psychological problems, and so on.
• why this university sucks so much
• historical/societal reasons for why students in the social sciences and humanities just care about getting A's and don't care about actually learning anything. (i would assume that students in the hard sciences/engineering care more because our culture encourages, both ideologically and economically, innovation and entrepreneurial spirits.)
  
  • i.e., because more and more jobs are requiring degrees, more high school students are going to college, not necessarily because they're passionate about learning, but because it's embedded in our culture and our economy that they need to.
  • it doesn't seem to matter that they're paying money to get an education -- they might as well be paying money to party for four years, as long as they get a degree at the end.
  • the rise in standardized testing and rote memorization in classes, especially large classes at berkeley, doesn't exactly encourage learning for the sake of learning.
• the effects of a large, bureaucratic institution on how students learn, how students apply their academic knowledge, how professors teach, and what professors teach.
• how money and the capitalistic economic system we're in affect this university
  
  • funding issues (i.e. BP) influencing the direction of research, intellectual property issues, etc.
  • effects of funding/lack of funding on the quality of education, quality and type of students who attend uc berkeley, quality of different academic departments, etc.
  • effects of the bureaucracy on students' social lives, student movements, professors, etc.
• the self-destructiveness of capitalism
  
  • i.e., it sells things that cater to people's most base desires such as entertainment, tasty but unhealthy food, etc. it doesn't encourage education or intellect.
    
  • these things do not produce people who are innovative entrepreneurs who can make successful businesses; these people make drones who keep on consuming. how can capitalism continue itself if there are only mindless consumers?
    
  • does this explain why the US both has a culture of innovation as well as a culture of anti-intellectualism?
  • it produces a lot of externalities, especially environmental ones (i.e. over-fishing and species extinction) that are harmful to it in the long-term

i could probably come up with more ideas, but i think this is a good start for now.

i kind of want to do research that involves getting my hands dirty or my feet wet or whatever instead of being stuck in a library or in front of my computer. so that narrows my options to more ethnographical or empirical research, which pretty much narrows my options to polyamory and bathroom graffiti on this list. which i think i would enjoy, they just don't sound very rigorous or academic. but maybe that doesn't matter, i donno.

advice would be appreciated. especially advice about which classes to take and whether i should choose my thesis before or after figuring out what classes i should take. i.e., if i decide to do my major about power and control in modern societies, can i still do my thesis on polyamory? maybe, but probably not so much.