Dear Students,

Institute of Sociology will host professors from European universities in May. You will have the opportunity to participate in short course and interesting open lectures given by accomplished sociologists. Please see the list of offered classes and scroll down for the details:

The diverse pathways of higher education students: A sociological analysis on inequality, context and agency, open lecture, Professor João Teixeira Lopes, University of Porto, Portugal

Happiness: Lessons from a new science, open lecture and short course, prof. Jorge Guardiola, Universidad de Granada

8 May 2014, 18:00, room 79, OPEN LECTURE:

The diverse pathways of higher education students: A sociological analysis on inequality, context and agency

Professor João Teixeira Lopes

University of Porto, Portugal

One of the consequences of the extension of access to higher education in Portugal, as in other countries, has been the diversification of students' social background. This process has not led to the elimination of social inequalities in students' access to and success in higher education, but those inequalities have not remained the same. In fact, there have been some highly significant and complex changes in this area. To study them, we carried out a comprehensive sociological investigation that covers the entire Portuguese higher education system—including universities and polytechnics—covering different areas of knowledge in different regions. The theoretic model included three levels of analysis: structural, institutional and biographical. The research design involved quantitative and qualitative methodological procedures. At the biographical level, in-depth interviews were conducted with 170 students. From these interviews we drew ‘sociological portraits' and built analytical types both of these students' structural and institutional positioning in their educational path and of how they actively shaped diverse types of personal trajectories. The identification of these types of student paths may help advance knowledge in this field, shedding considerably more light than the usual administrative categories of ‘success', ‘failure' and ‘dropout'.

26-30 May 2014, short course and OPEN LECTURE: May 26, 18:00, room 13

Happiness: Lessons from a new science

Jorge Guardiola

Universidad de Granada, Spain

Happiness is, in a nutshell, a goal that most people pursuit, as well as a positive feeling or emotion in the present. Everybody has his/her own idea of happiness and the tools to achieve it. In this course we are going to learn about happiness, but from a scientific perspective. The facilitator of this course is an economist, but he will aim to deal with happiness in an interdisciplinary way. Some of the questions we will attempt to solve are how to measure happiness, what are the factors that increase or decrease happiness or to what extent money can "buy" happiness.

Timetable available in USOSweb: https://www.usosweb.uj.edu.pl/kontroler.php?_action=actionx:katalog2/przedmioty/pokazPrzedmiot(kod:WFz.IS-SOJ060)

Please contact me (erasmus.is@edu.pl) to register to the course. No registration required for open lecture.