Areas of Strength

The fields of Politics and Social Movements ask and investigate many of the discipline’s foundational questions. They include topics of state and society relations, political and economic development, and collective action. Particularly in times of great political upheaval, immense economic inequality, and vast social transformation, the fields of Politics and Social Movements remain critical to sociology and its efforts to understand the dynamics of power relations and social change.

The Politics and Social Movements fields at Rutgers include a wide array of faculty members with diverse substantive interests. We are linked by our shared concern with large and small-scale patterns of social organization, transformation, and inequality using a variety of methods, including case-study, comparative-historical, interview, natural language processing, statistical, and social network analysis. Current faculty research focuses on a variety of important topics including: migration and immigration (Chaudhary and Lee); social networks, collective behavior, and political mobilization (Davidson, McLean, and Salime); social movements, narratives, discourses, and identity construction (Gerson, Jones, Stein); environmental hazards, institutional responses, and organizational catastrophes (Brechin, Cerulo, Clarke, and MacKendrick); and enduring forms of inequality in the United States (Mai and Shepherd.)

Faculty members work together across specific research interest groupings to offer students instruction and direction according to their needs and the unique qualities of their projects. Our objectives are to train graduate students in multiple methods; to introduce them to the most important debates and topics of research in our fields; and to mentor them in the pursuit of their own research interests through the department's qualifying paper and dissertation requirements. Graduate and undergraduate teaching in the fields include numerous courses, including Political Sociology, Social Movements, Social Inequality, and Sociology of Organizations.

• Rutgers Profile: Steven Brechin , Emily Handsman , Leslie Kay Jones , Catherine Lee , Norah MacKendrick , Quan Mai , Paul McLean , Zakia Salime , Hana Shepherd

Rutgers Sociology has a cluster of scholars who conduct research on organizations, social networks, and the key characteristics of the contemporary workplace. From cradle to grave, day in and day out, complex formal organizations—businesses, schools, government departments, law firms, hospitals, non-profits, NGOs, media organizations, religious groups, universities—profoundly shape our lives. They dictate the kind of work that is available and the nature of that work. They exert a powerful impact on the distribution of resources and authority in society. They create roles and relations among their members, and they deeply influence individuals’ subjective experience of the world. Sociologists have identified important properties and tendencies existing in formal organizations, many of which apply regardless of the specific tasks organizations set out to do. Furthermore, organizations—for-profits and non-profits alike—interact with each other, and as a result, they often come to look and behave similarly.

The formal and informal networks that operate within and between organizations are among the factors playing a decisive part in bringing about their convergence. But networks—relationships among people, families, groups, events, objects, and more—exist ubiquitously throughout the social world, often independently of formal organizational structures, driven by their own distinctive logics and dynamic processes. Social network analysis is an especially vibrant intellectual field today, devoted to theorizing how social relations and, more broadly, social structure, generate crucial outcomes such as identity formation, unequal resource distributions, occupational and geographic mobility, technological innovation, information diffusion, cultural transformations, and social protest. As a research cluster, we support and encourage both formal organizational and social-network theoretical frameworks, and in adopting them, we deploy a variety of methods, including qualitative, experimental, comparative-historical, computational, and structuralist techniques, signifying our commitment to a holistic approach to the topic of social organization.

Core faculty members in this cluster are particularly interested in: mobility, precarity, and social inequalities in the workplace (Mai, Chaudhary, Shepherd); organizations' capacities to foster immigrant integration, collective action, and transnational development (Chaudhary, Brooks); political and economic elites (McLean, Davidson); adolescent networks (Shepherd); civil society and the environment (Brechin, Mai); the intersection of social networks and culture (McLean, Shepherd, Davidson); and organizations’ capacity to create and manage risk and disaster (Brechin, Falzon). Students interested in this cluster can also benefit from an engagement with other expert faculty in the Rutgers Business School, the Department of Human Ecology, the School of Communication and Information, the School of Social Work, the School of Management and Labor Relations, and the Bloustein School of Public Policy.

• Rutgers Profile: Emily Bosk , Steven Brechin , Ethel Brooks , Danielle Falzon , Emily Handsman , Quan Mai , Paul McLean , Hana Shepherd

Health is typically thought to be the domain of the allied medical fields, but the health of populations are deeply sociocultural phenomena. The sociological study of health, population, and biomedicine enables analyses of the critical role that social factors play in the health of individuals, groups, and the larger society. Our department’s program in health, population and biomedicine provides students with the theoretical and methodological tools to think beyond biology in order to answer some of the thorniest questions in medicine and public health.

Our program proudly continues a long tradition of excellence in medical sociology at Rutgers University. In the late 1970s, David Mechanic established the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research (IFH), which continues to serve as an important interdisciplinary home for research on the social and cultural determinants of health. Research in population and the life course originated here during the 1960s. Matilda White Riley, Anne Foner, and others developed the age stratification model, which continues to be one of the major paradigms in this area. Our award-winning faculty today conduct research on a broad set of subjects across the sociology of medicine, population health, and biomedicine including demographic research on suicide rates in the United States (Phillips), children’s health assessments (Bzostek), pain and stigma (Kempner), race and biomedicine (Bliss, Lee), Black American health (Mouzon), community contexts and health (Lei), environmental health (MacKendrick), gendered effects on biomarkers (Springer), and the sociology of drugs (Kempner).

We offer rigorous graduate training and mentoring in medical sociology, population studies as well as the politics of knowledge. Our most recent graduates have secured positions as tenure-track assistant professors, postdoctoral fellows, or research scientists at prestigious institutions including the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, Columbia School of Public Health, Weill Cornell Medicine, National Center for Health Statistics, Brown University, University of Maryland-Baltimore, University of Delaware, Princeton University, RAND Corporation, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University. At the undergraduate level, we offer a variety of courses on social dimensions of health and medicine. Our minor in Health and Society provides students with an excellent opportunity to study questions of physical and mental health, health behaviors and practices, and health care institutions, through a social and cultural lens, and across national and global contexts.

• Rutgers Profile: Rina Bliss , Sharon Bzostek , Stephen Crystal , Joanna Kempner , Catherine Lee , Lei Lei , Jacquelyn Litt , Norah MacKendrick , Dawne M. Mouzon , Lenna Neponmyaschy , Julie Phillips , Kristen W. Springer

Mission Statement

There is nothing normal or inevitable about the way in which the world is arranged. The globe as we know it is a historical product: Its current structures used not to exist – they have emerged over time – and they will eventually give way to other structures. The world is not a natural composite of competing and/or cooperating nation-states. Nor is it an even playing field, in which individuals (currently just over seven billion of us humans) compete for resources, power and recognition through a gallant and fair game so that the best win and the undeserving lose. The world is, instead, an ever more tightly interconnected set of hierarchies. It forms a historical system that produces its own racialized and gendered inequalities, economic injustices, power differentials, new cultural, religious and aesthetic forms of expression, conflicts, resistance and change. The recognition that a powerful global process is driving the gentrification of poor neighborhoods, shaping the financial crisis in Europe, or farmers’ suicide in India, mass displacement of indigenous communities, or transnational uprisings opened tremendous possibilities for sociological investigation. Our aim is to build competence, create bridges through scholarly engagements with other disciplines and global centers across the World, and make creative contributions in this burgeoning field. Our faculty and students engage these questions through their interest in:

• Race, localities and racializations,
• Gender, sexualities and sexisms,
• Geopolitics, nationalisms, imperialisms,
• Alternatives to capitalism,
• Environmental crisis and preservation
• World and global histories,
• Global-local memories and politics of historiography,
• Migration and transnationalism,
• Scale, space and place,
• Representations and repressions,
• Internationalisms and solidarities,
• Oppression and resistance,
• War, militarism and peace –

• Rutgers Profile: Steven Brechin , Ethel Brooks , Zaire Dinzey-Flores , Danielle Falzon , Ricardo Martinez-Schuldt , Zakia Salime