This course examines culture, cognition, and their mutual relationship. To grapple with this topic, we will look at classical and contemporary theories of culture, as well as contemporary research from sociology and the cognitive sciences. Along the way, we’ll ask and get some answers to big questions about culture (What is culture? How does it shape our perceptions, judgements, and actions? How does it (re)produce inequality? How and why does it change or stay the same?) and cognition (How does society shape how we classify, attend, and remember the world around us? How much thought goes into human behaviour? How is cognition shaped by contexts, bodies, and emotions?). Ultimately, the aims of this class are to 1) demonstrate how insights about cognition can strengthen how sociologists conceptualize, theorize, and measure culture, and 2) to illustrate the thoroughly cultural nature of our mental lives.