This course introduces classical and contemporary approaches to the study of social stratification and mobility. It examines how life-chances are available to differently situated social groups as a result of economic, cultural and political processes. It discusses, on one hand, both how institutional arrangements structure the rights and privileges of different groups, and on the other, how social practices alter these structures as active moments of the stratifying processes. The course seeks to sensitize students to the normative concerns underlying stratification and mobility studies, and makes accessible to them techniques developed to assess the empirical claims of different theories.