Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities (INSH)

INSH 1000. Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern. (1 Hour)

Intended for freshmen in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Introduces freshmen to the liberal arts in general. Offers students an opportunity to become familiar with their major, to develop the academic skills necessary to succeed (analytical ability and critical thinking), to become grounded in the culture and values of the university community, and to develop interpersonal skills—in short, to become familiar with all the skills needed to become a successful university student.

INSH 1102. Food in Contemporary Context. (4 Hours)

Offers a multidisciplinary set of perspectives on an intrinsic part of daily life—food. Food is not just about survival—it is about being human. Producing it, making it, eating it, obsessing about it is woven throughout our lives. It defines, and is defined by, culture. It is the basis of economies, has produced great fortunes, defines entire communities, and is the cause of conflicts. It is at once natural and artificial, grown and manufactured. It nourishes us and makes us sick. It is the source of sublime pleasure and no small anxiety. Food defines us, as much as we define it. With these considerations, this course uses food as a lens into contemporary life.

Attribute(s): NUpath Societies/Institutions

INSH 1300. Introduction to Health and Humanities. (4 Hours)

Explores the ways in which narrative and other forms of creative and cultural expression help shape conceptions of illness, healing, and the body. Offers students opportunities to consider the health and humanities through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and genres. Includes small-group and classwide experiential field outings. Culminates in the composition of reflective responses, a medical ethics/medical journalism piece, and a team-based experiential e-portfolio project. Course objectives include differentiating between healing and curing; knowing how to elicit, listen to, and analyze stories to determine how participants in the healthcare system experience illness and healing; being able to articulate the ways health is a cultural construct; and using this analysis to identify an empathic response as a future professional.

Attribute(s): NUpath Interpreting Culture

INSH 1600. Cultures of London - Abroad. (4 Hours)

Offers students in London an opportunity to learn about and interact with visual art and architecture and literary representations of the city. Examines how different peoples and different art forms have helped to shape the culture of this multicultural city over a span of some 400 years (from the Renaissance to contemporary London). Students read poetry, prose, and drama; attend theatrical events; and explore the city through walking tours and visits to historic sites. Seeks to develop familiarity with the critical, historical, and theoretical tools necessary to to understand how imperial and colonial histories have shaped the cultures of London and the experiences of its citizens of diverse races, ethnicities, and regional or national identities.

Attribute(s): NUpath Difference/Diversity, NUpath Interpreting Culture

INSH 1990. Elective. (1-4 Hours)

Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.

INSH 2101. Love and Hate: Social, Psychological, and Literary Approaches. (4 Hours)

Studies materials that define and describe love and hate from the fields of literature and literary criticism, social psychology, and criminology and criminal justice. “Love” and “hate” are small words describing powerful emotions with profound effects on individuals and on social groups. Focusing largely on contemporary examples, offers students an opportunity to analyze the differences and areas of overlap in the above fields’ approaches to love and hate, to discuss societal responses to these emotions, and to apply the methodologies of each field to research questions of their own. INSH 2101 and PSYC 2101 are cross-listed.

Prerequisite(s): ENGW 1111 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of C or ENGW 1102 with a minimum grade of C or ENGL 1111 with a minimum grade of C or ENGL 1102 with a minimum grade of C

Attribute(s): NUpath Interpreting Culture, NUpath Societies/Institutions

INSH 2102. Bostonography: The City through Data, Texts, Maps, and Networks. (4 Hours)

Uses Boston as a case study for integrating computational methods with the social sciences and humanities to provide new insights into major cultural, historical, and societal questions as they relate to and extend beyond the city of Boston. Through lectures, discussions, and labs, the course examines a variety of data sets that measure geographic, historical, literary, political, civic, and institutional landscapes. Offers students an opportunity to combine analytical tools, such as geospatial mapping, data visualization, and network science, with readings, hands-on class activities, and museum or site visits, enabling a comprehensive view of complex cultural and social phenomena.

Prerequisite(s): CS 2500 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of D- or (DS 2000 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of D- ; DS 2001 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of D- )

Attribute(s): NUpath Interpreting Culture, NUpath Societies/Institutions

INSH 2300. Culture, Technology, and the Future of Health. (4 Hours)

Introduces the challenges posed by the data-heavy medicine of the future to privacy, the appropriate collection of medical data, and the ways that patients and healthcare workers alike think about health. Offers students an opportunity to learn how to use critical and ethical theories, analyze health narratives, and use historical and contemporary data about health disparities to forecast how new technologies might pose social and cultural challenges. Takes a humanities perspective to critically evaluate social and cultural aspects of a healthcare system shaped by emerging technologies and the data they produce.

Attribute(s): NUpath Difference/Diversity, NUpath Societies/Institutions

INSH 2963. Topics. (1,2 Hours)

Offers undergraduate students an opportunity to learn about timely issues, develop new skills, or explore areas of broad interest in an immersive, short-course format. Content and instructors vary by offering. May be repeated three times.

INSH 2964. Experiential Project. (0 Hours)

Offers students an applied project setting in which to apply their curricular learning. Working with a sponsor, students refine an applied research topic, perform research, develop recommendations that are shared with a partner sponsor, and create a plan for implementing their recommendations. Seeks to benefit students with a curriculum that supports the development of key business communication skills, project and client management skills, and frameworks for business analysis. Offers students an opportunity to learn from sponsor feedback, review 'lessons learned,' and incorporate suggestions from this review to improve and further develop their career development and professional plan.

INSH 2990. Elective. (1-4 Hours)

Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.

INSH 2992. Research. (0 Hours)

Offers an opportunity to document student contributions to research projects or creative endeavors.

INSH 3101. Research Methods in the Social Sciences. (4 Hours)

Introduces the basic concepts involved in conducting research in the social sciences. Familiarizes students with the scientific methods that are necessary for systematic analysis of social behavior, societal trends, program effectiveness, and public attitudes through readings, lectures, group discussions, and research assignments. Offers students an opportunity to learn how to formulate a research question, investigate and critique how questions are researched, develop a research design, and obtain the critical thinking skills necessary to consume interdisciplinary research across the social sciences.

Attribute(s): NUpath Analyzing/Using Data, NUpath Writing Intensive

INSH 3102. Introduction to Statistics in the Social Sciences. (4 Hours)

Presents a foundation in different statistical techniques that may be utilized to answer research questions in the social sciences. Examines a range of computational social science techniques across data platforms to address societal problems. Emphasizes existing databases that may inform questions in the social sciences. Also introduces students to different ways to display or visualize quantitative data. Offers students an opportunity to learn how to produce and consume quantitative information.

Attribute(s): NUpath Analyzing/Using Data, NUpath Formal/Quant Reasoning

INSH 3990. Elective. (1-4 Hours)

Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.

INSH 4990. Elective. (1-4 Hours)

Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.

INSH 4998. Research. (0 Hours)

Offers an opportunity to document student contributions to research projects or creative endeavors.

INSH 5183. Interdisciplinary Special Topics: Pop-up Course. (1,2 Hours)

Addresses timely trends, issues, and events as they unfold. Offers students an opportunity to learn about and respond to issues of the day in an immersive, interdisciplinary, short-course format. Content and instructors vary by offering. May be repeated three times for a maximum of six semester hours.

INSH 5301. Introduction to Computational Statistics. (4 Hours)

Introduces the fundamental techniques of quantitative data analysis, ranging from foundational skills—such as data description and visualization, probability, and statistics—to the workhorse of data analysis and regression, to more advanced topics—such as machine learning and networks. Emphasizes real-world data and applications using the R statistical computing language. Analyzing and understanding complex data has become an essential component of numerous fields: business and economics, health and medicine, marketing, public policy, computer science, engineering, and many more. Offers students an opportunity to finish the course ready to apply a wide variety of analytic methods to data problems, present their results to nonexperts, and progress to more advanced course work delving into the many topics introduced here.

INSH 5302. Information Design and Visual Analytics. (4 Hours)

Introduces the systematic use of visualization techniques for supporting the discovery of new information as well as the effective presentation of known facts. Based on principles from art, graphic design, perceptual psychology, and rhetoric, offers students an opportunity to learn how to successfully choose appropriate visual languages for representing various kinds of data to support insights relevant to the user’s goals. Covers visual data mining techniques and algorithms for supporting the knowledge-discovery process; principles of visual perception and color theory for revealing patterns in data, semiotics, and the epistemology of visual representation; narrative strategies for communicating and presenting information and evidence; and the critical evaluation and critique of data visualizations. Requires proficiency in R.

INSH 5602. Documenting Fieldwork Narratives: Oral History, Ethnography, Archival Practices. (4 Hours)

Examines the ethics, politics, and social aspects of three primary areas of interdisciplinary research and knowledge production at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities: oral history, ethnography, and archiving. Offers students an opportunity to learn to conduct oral history, ethnography, and archiving; gain experience collecting and formatting information collected through these qualitative techniques; and be introduced to digital platforms for oral history, ethnography, and archiving. Offers instruction in critiquing examples of how researchers collect and analyze qualitative information. Studies the critical thinking skills necessary to build a research project from the formulation of a research idea through the research design planning process.

INSH 5603. Qualitative Methods. (4 Hours)

Introduces the principles and use of common qualitative methods with a particular focus on their application in the social sciences. Students practice designing qualitative research. Offers students an opportunity to gain experience using diverse analytic and theory building techniques, conducting field observations and interviews, and analyzing content. Examines the foundation of core concepts in research. Topics include objectivity, bias, empiricism, validity, triangulation, and ethical issues surrounding human subjects—such as confidentiality, anonymity, and vulnerable populations.

INSH 5963. Topics. (1,2 Hours)

Offers students an opportunity to learn about timely issues, develop new skills, or explore areas of broad interest in an immersive, short-course format. Content and instructors vary by offering. May be repeated three times.

INSH 5964. Projects for Professionals. (0 Hours)

Offers students an applied project setting in which to apply their curricular learning. Working with a sponsor, students refine an applied research topic, perform research, develop recommendations that are shared with a partner sponsor, and create a plan for implementing their recommendations. Seeks to benefit students with a curriculum that supports the development of key business communication skills, project and client management skills, and frameworks for business analysis. Offers students an opportunity to learn from sponsor feedback, review 'lessons learned,' and incorporate suggestions from this review to improve and further develop their career development and professional plan.

INSH 5965. Engaging with Industry Partners for Rising Professionals. (0 Hours)

Offers students an enhanced applied project setting in which to apply their curricular learning. Working with a partner sponsor, students refine an applied research topic, perform research, develop recommendations that are shared with the partner sponsor, and create a plan for implementing their recommendations. Curriculum supports students as they develop key business communication skills, project and client management skills, and frameworks for business analysis. Offers students an opportunity to learn from sponsor feedback, review lessons learned, and incorporate suggestions to improve and further hone their career development and professional plan. Career development opportunities through skill-building workshops, panels, and interview preparation are available. Partner-student interactions, including a culminating project presentation, allow partners to assess student potential for co-op, internship, or other employment opportunities with the partner.

INSH 6101. Agent-Based Modeling for Applied and Social Sciences. (4 Hours)

Introduces complexity-based models, most notably agent-based models, and their possible applications to a range of planning and public policy issues. Exposes students to complexity theory and methods, including interactions, adaptation, and evolution; cellular automata, agents, networks, and genetic algorithms; and epistemology—the meaning and applications of models. Focuses on modeling and software, including building on sample models; running experiments and analyzing results; and verification, sensitivity, and validation.

INSH 6300. Research Methods in the Social Sciences. (4 Hours)

Surveys methods of social research, including field study and participant observation techniques, survey techniques, interviewing and questionnaire construction, sampling procedures, experimental design, content analysis, and use of available data.

INSH 6302. Qualitative Methods. (4 Hours)

Introduces the principles and use of common qualitative methods with a particular focus on their application in the social sciences. Offers students an opportunity to engage in primary data collection and to learn how to use a variety of analytic techniques, including transcription, field-note preparation, memos, development of coding schemes and conceptual frameworks, and data-verifying techniques.

INSH 6304. Modeling and Analyzing Social Networks. (4 Hours)

Offers a high-level introduction to the analytic methods and conceptual perspectives of a social network approach. Introduces the social network perspective and computational tools for social network analysis (R, RStudio, and Gephi). Identifies the mathematical properties of social networks, including centrality, clustering, transitivity, and structural equivalence. Introduces exponential random graph models and stochastic actor-oriented models. Using these tools, studies social and cultural phenomena across the social sciences and humanities.

INSH 6406. Analyzing Complex Digitized Data. (4 Hours)

Introduces cutting-edge ways of structuring and analyzing complex data or digitized text-as-data using the open-source programming language Python. Scholars across multiple disciplines are finding themselves face-to-face with massive amounts of digitized data. In the humanities and social sciences, these data are often in the form of unstructured text and un- or under-structured data. Encourages students to think about novel ways they can apply these techniques to their own data and research questions and to apply the methods in their own research, whether it be in academia or in industry.

INSH 6500. Statistical Analysis. (4 Hours)

Studies the use of social science quantitative techniques, emphasizing applications of value to public-sector analysts and scholars alike. Introduces probability and statistical analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability and probability distributions, sampling distributions and hypothesis testing, bivariate correlation, regression, and forecasting. Examines how to generate and interpret statistical analyses.

INSH 6864. Experiential Integration. (1 Hour)

Offers an integration course providing an opportunity for students on experiential placement to connect conceptual course material to experiential components. Students are expected to: interact with students from other disciplines, apply knowledge and skills across educational and experiential contexts; connect experiential components to different disciplines and domains of knowledge; and situate experiential components in the context of their own field and beyond. Requires department signature. May be repeated once.

Prerequisite(s): CRIM 6964 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or CRIM 6965 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or ECON 6964 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or ECON 6965 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or ENGL 6964 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or POLS 6964 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or PPUA 6964 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S or PPUA 6965 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of S

INSH 6964. Co-op Work Experience. (0 Hours)

Provides eligible students with an opportunity for work experience. May be repeated once.

INSH 7101. Qualitative Research Design. (4 Hours)

Introduces the logic of qualitative inquiry and various qualitative data collection strategies including field observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and archival materials. Suitable for students in a range of social scientific disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science, public policy, criminal justice, population health, nursing, and applied psychology. Offers students an opportunity to obtain a foundation for essential aspects of research design as well as hands-on experience in data collection techniques around a topic of the student’s choosing.

INSH 7102. Qualitative Data Analysis. (4 Hours)

The goal of this course is to introduce students to methods for analyzing different forms of qualitative data. The course will train students in developing coding strategies to analyze qualitative data and introduces them to qualitative data software. Students will learn how to apply deductive and inductive coding, how to develop coding structures appropriate for various genres (e.g., exploratory, descriptive, narrative), and how to theorize from qualitative data. Students will receive extensive training in writing up qualitative research findings, from analytic memos to a publishable paper or dissertation chapter.

Prerequisite(s): INSH 5603 with a minimum grade of C or INSH 7101 with a minimum grade of C

INSH 7103. Mixed Methods Research. (4 Hours)

Introduces the theory and practice of mixed method inquiry in the social sciences, broadly defined. Presents an overview of historical roots of mixed methods research, the major paradigms driving contemporary mixed methods research, and the four most common research designs applied in mixed methods research (concurrent, sequential, embedded, and multiphase). Studies how to evaluate the validity and quality of mixed methods research. Offers students an opportunity to develop a research protocol for a mixed methods research project.

INSH 7300. Advanced Research Methods in the Social Sciences and Humanities. (4 Hours)

Provides instruction in all aspects of research methodology in the social sciences and humanities, including causality; the measurement process; sampling procedures; scaling; use of available data; research designs, such as quantitative and qualitative survey methods, experimental design, and evaluation research; and methodological complexities such as mediation, moderation, and nonlinear processes.

INSH 7400. Quantitative Analysis. (4 Hours)

Studies the use of social science quantitative techniques and how to generate and interpret statistical analyses. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability and probability distributions, sampling distributions and hypothesis testing, bivariate correlation, regression, and forecasting. Builds upon the concepts of correlation and inference to present analytic procedures involving several variables (including multiple regression, logistic regression, causal analysis, and multiway ANOVA) and introduces more advanced multivariate analytic methods.

Prerequisite(s): INSH 5301 with a minimum grade of C or INSH 6500 with a minimum grade of C

INSH 7500. Advanced Quantitative Analysis. (4 Hours)

Designed to build upon the foundations provided by INSH 6404, INSH 6500, or an equivalent introductory statistics course with the goal of students becoming proficient with selected quantitative multivariate analysis techniques. Covers the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model and the assumptions underlying it in detail, as well as the techniques for analyzing data when OLS assumptions do not apply, such as simultaneous equation models, time-series models, and maximum likelihood techniques for limited and discrete dependent variables. Requires prior completion of INSH 6404, INSH 6500, or an equivalent introductory statistics course. PhD students only or by permission.

Prerequisite(s): INSH 7400 with a minimum grade of C

INSH 7600. Multilevel Theorizing and Analysis. (4 Hours)

Explores advanced data analysis tools for research. Offers students an opportunity to engage in multilevel theorizing and to become proficient in the foundations of multilevel analysis. The course is project based; students formulate a multilevel research question and engage multilevel theory, data, and analysis.

INSH 7910. NULab Project Seminar. (2 Hours)

Offers students an opportunity to learn and use digital humanities methods with others in groups and across disciplines in the collaborative space of the NULab seminar. May be repeated up to three times.

INSH 9980. Experiential PhD Research Residency. (0 Hours)

Comprises a research residency experience in an organization whose mission and activities are aligned with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities PhD programs. The research residency is designed to help develop dissertation ideas or research papers or to obtain access to resources helpful to dissertation development or research. A faculty member serves as an advisor for the residency experience, but individuals within the organization in which the student is working are asked to serve as formal mentors for the student residency experience. May be repeated two times.