About the Course
This is a course about what community is, what functions it serves to individuals, families, and society, and why the well-being of communities matters to all of us. Communities are where most of us learned who we are and what are role(s) should be in society. Communities give us an identity, a tribe, social roles, responsibilities, and tremendous resources. People who live a vibrant and engaged community life are healthier, wealthier, happier, and safer than people who have no community. Too much community can be oppressive, stifling, judgmental, and exclusionary to many. In this way, 
community is like many other things in life…too much or too little cause’s problems. So what is the community sweet spot? Hopefully, by the end of the semester, you’ll have an answer to that question.
You will learn how social scientists define community, the leading social theories that explain the birth, life, and death of communities, the tremendous range of communities in America, the dimensions of community, the key concepts in the field of community research, and the effects of community structure on individuals, families, and society. You will learn about rural places and the range of ways in which communities can be destroyed, reborn, and revitalized. You will also learn some interesting things about yourself, including the nature of your own community experience, your orientation to groups, collectives, associations, and organizations, your level of civic engagement, and you will get some perspective about your likely future community involvement.
The Rural Community Project
In this course, you'll use social science concepts and community frameworks to guide your deep dive into a small town of your choosing. The community capitals framework is a useful way of seeing the different parts and systems of the community and understanding it more holistically. It's also a great way to think about measuring communities. Over the semester, you'll learn about each of the seven community capitals, what they are, why they're important, and how we measure them in the social sciences. You'll also learn why some people feel a deep connection to a place, why others are ashamed of where they came from, and why people in some communities are so good at helping each other in times of crisis, whereas in other places, it's every person for themself.
The project is self-guided and developed in small, weekly assignments with feedback from your professor at each stage. Over the semester, you'll slowly compile a rich, 360-degree profile of a rural town of your choosing. Each week, you'll do a little sleuthing on Wikipedia, the town's public webpage, Facebook group discussions, the Chamber of Commerce pages, and in databases, infographics, and web-based dashboards to help you make sense of what makes your community tick. Dig into its origin story, its natural resources, and its culture and 
traditions. The curriculum introduces you to a vast array of data sources and ways of learning about and assessing small towns and rural communities. By the end of the course, you should know how to quickly and holistically evaluate communities as a place to raise a family, vacation, relocate a business, open a factory, retire, or attend college, for example.
Small and rural towns are interesting places. I've lived and worked in towns ranging from a few thousand to just a few hundred. They come in lots of varieties and often embody incredibly distinctive flavors of American and international culture. They have unique founding stories, ranging from fundamentalist religious sects, utopian communal groups, ethnic immigrant communities, and wild and unruly energy boomtowns of the Mountain West. You'll learn about amenity-rich mountain ski towns of the super wealthy, resource-extractive coal towns in Appalachia, aging farming towns of the great plains, fishing villages along the Oregon coast, and industrial towns across the Mississippi delta. Along the way, you'll learn about the Sociology of Community and its suite of powerful and intuitive concepts like attachment to place, civic engagement, social cohesion, and social capital.
Click here to watch a selection of student community profile presentations (~5 minutes each).
How it all Works
This is an online, self-paced course, which means you get to find a time each week that works for your schedule.
Guided by curated readings and videos, you'll learn about the varieties 
of rural towns and the ways we classify and categorize them in the social sciences. A weekly reading assessment will help you gauge your learning. With weekly project activities, you'll steadily build a well-designed, rich, and data-driven community profile.
At the end of the semester, we'll each share a brief, pre-recorded lecture about our community project. At our end-of-semester virtual symposium, you'll get to see the varieties of communities across the US, as captured by your classmates. No two community profiles are the same: You'll get to develop your community project in line with your disciplinary training. If you're a data science student, it will likely be a data-rich assessment and strong on analytics and gorgeous data visualizations. Design students may give more attention to the built environment, community stories, and a top-notch project report design. Social science students often find clever ways to reveal the norms, customs, and hidden social structures that shape community life. You have lots of flexibility to create a final project that reflects your skills, interests, and disciplinary training.
See you in the Fall
Most of you will end up in the vast American suburban landscape or in a large city like Denver, Seattle, or Chicago. For a brief semester, I'll try to convince you that small towns and rural areas are exceptional places and that the people there can surprise you in all of the ways that city life does. If this sounds like a useful way to collect up a few credits toward your degree, shoot me an email or simply enroll in the course. I'd love to have you in class and look forward to introducing you to Community Sociology.
SHOOT ME AN EMAIL IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS THE COURSE (sdorius@iastate.edu)