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Graduate

Areas of Strength

The department has seven core areas of specialization, with flexible boundaries between them (many faculty members bridge two or more of these areas). The crime and social control area focuses on the relationship of crime, criminal justice, and social control institutions with family, community, education, and inequality. The culture and cognition area emphasizes the complex ways in which thought, culturally received symbols and values, and social interaction affect one another. The environment and sustainability area focuses on the ways people interact with the physical and natural environment, especially related to development, disaster, and risk. The gender, difference, inequality area focuses on issues of difference and inequality related to gender, race, ethnic, and class positions. The health, population, and life course area concentrates on social factors that affect health and illness, the system of medical care, and the effects of aging (through all phases of the life course) on health. The political and economic sociology area concentrates on large scale patterns of social organization, power, and conflict, with a growing emphasis on globalization. The social networks area focuses on the cultural, historical, and institutional dynamics of social relations.

These specialty areas represent the strengths of research and training among the faculty in the department. Graduate students do not formally affiliate with these areas and do not have specific course requirements for their degrees to specialize in an area.  The specialty areas reflect the types of subjects in which students can gain solid support for their own research interests. This may be concentrated in one group or at the intersection of multiple areas.

Mission Statement

Rutgers University has long been known for its strengths in the area of gender and women's studies. The Department of Sociology builds upon those strengths, and today includes eleven core faculty members who regularly offer graduate seminars in race, class and gender; sociology of gender; feminist theory; inequalities; sexualities; the body; gender and globalization; and gender and the self.

Our approach to the sociology of gender focuses upon issues of difference and inequality. We look at gender across racial, ethnic, national, sexual, and religious differences, drawing linkages to cultural studies, post-structuralism, race studies, and post-colonial and globalization studies, and to theories of identities, boundaries, performance, and symbolic representation. We are also centrally interested in issues relating to the distribution of resources, comparing the situations of women and men, looking at inequality among women, among men, and at different local, state, and global structural locations.

Our students work on a wide range of projects, including transgender issues, transnational identities, gender theory, the body, and emotions, among others, as the following list of dissertation topics indicates.

Our work in the Department is enhanced by ongoing interdisciplinary efforts in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, which offers graduate courses and a Graduate Certificate in women’s studies, the Institute for Research on Women, which hosts a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar for faculty and graduate students, the Center for Women and Work, the Center for Women's Global Leadership, and other programs at the university.

The Department of Sociology at Rutgers University offers one of the most expansive and outstanding national graduate programs in the sociology of the environment and sustainability. Environment and sustainability (or environmental sociology) is a subfield of the discipline that captures society-environment interactions and sustainability across a number of research areas, theoretical orientations, and methods. The sociology of environment and sustainability is inherently interdisciplinary, open to a wide range of interpretations and approaches.

Eleven sociologists make up our graduate faculty, with three located in the neighboring Department of Human Ecology (School of Environmental and Biological Sciences), one in the School of Communications & Information, and one in the School of Management and Labor Relations. Faculty in our program employ multiple research methods and maintain active research programs across numerous research and teaching areas, including:

  • climate change, mitigation, adaptation, justice, and forced migration
  • climate finance, policy, advocacy and promotion
  • energy and energy use
  • environmental health
  • environmental history and policy
  • environmental justice 
  • environmental and sustainable organizations (industry, nonprofits/civil society, and international organizations, “green” publicity and marketing)
  • environmentalisms, media and environment; public opinion
  • food and sustainable food systems
  • gender
  • green jobs and just transitions
  • sustainable consumption, development, and environmental behaviors
  • risk and disasters

Students in our graduate program are exposed to varied professional experts and networks, and have access to a deep bench of faculty members for mentorship, supervision, and committee assignments. In addition to earning a Ph.D. in Sociology, graduate students who specialize in environment and sustainability have the opportunity to earn a Graduate Certificate in Human Dimensions of Environmental Change.  Graduates from our PhD program have successfully secured research and teaching positions across many settings – from top liberal arts colleges to large research universities in sociology, human ecology, and environmental studies programs, to employment in nonprofits, government agencies and think tanks. Our undergraduates have the opportunity to take a variety of sociology courses centered on environmental issues. A number of these courses fulfill requirements in the interdisciplinary major/minor, Environmental Studies, housed in the Geography department.

The field of sociology of culture addresses questions of the social creation and implications of symbols, language, ideas, art, religion, science, media, law, institutions, interactions, and subjective experiences. The field also provides distinct frameworks for approaching social research, and theoretical perspectives on the nature of human action and thought. It is a big and diverse subfield of sociology that accommodates many substantive topics, theoretical traditions, and methodological perspectives. Many cultural sociologists are interested in using the lens of culture and insights about shared meanings to understand issues such as inequality, race, gender, politics, health, migration, economics, and organizations.

The Rutgers sociology department has been at the forefront of an approach to culture that takes seriously the role of cognition, including mental representations, cognitive processes, and their interaction with the body. Scholars of culture and cognition are interested in topics such as: the nature of mental structures, representations, and memory; the social bases of cognitive processes; and processes of human behavior. Work in this area often draws on insights from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Emeriti professors Karen Cerulo and Eviatar Zerubavel pioneered important and distinct perspectives on cognition and culture that are widely acclaimed and used within sociology.

Faculty and students at Rutgers work on a number of topics within the sociology of culture including how technology, art, and media are produced and contribute to the circulation of symbols and meanings (Jones, Kempner, McLean, Shepherd, Zhou); how knowledge and expertise are produced and deployed (Handsman, Jones, Kempner, Lee, MacKendrick, Shepherd); how social networks capture interaction, meanings, and relationships (McLean, Shepherd); how social context contributes to the meaning of identity, especially regarding race, class, religion, sexuality, and gender (Brooks, Dinzey-Flores, Hwang, Jones, MacKendrick, Salime); how the physical body, bodily experiences, and representations of the body interact with the social world (Kempner, Lee, MacKendrick); and finally, how aspects of culture are associated with differential power and can be deployed in the service of power and exclusion (Brooks, Dinzey-Flores, Handsman, Hwang, Jones, Lee, McLean, Salime, Zhou).

The Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers provides faculty and graduate student fellowships to pursue work in cultural sociology. Graduate students interested in this area have pursued many different types of projects using diverse methods and approaches to research. We offer a wide array of graduate classes in this area, and graduate students interested in the sociology of culture benefit from methodological training in qualitative methods such as interviews, narratives, and ethnography, and in quantitative methods including computational and network methods. Our graduates have been highly successful in crafting award-winning articles and dissertations, and in obtaining outstanding placements upon completion of our program. At the undergraduate level, students interested in the study of culture and its associated phenomenon can take classes in the Sociology of Culture (220), Seminar in Cognitive Sociology, Law and Society, Race, Science, and Medicine, and topics classes such as Food, Culture and Society. Many undergraduate sociology majors pursue honors projects related to the sociology of culture.

The question of how societies maintain compliance with social norms and boundaries is a foundational concern within sociology. Crime is also important within sociology, both as a salient challenge to social control and a means through which societies affirm their values and norms. The Department of Sociology faculty has long addressed the sources and consequences of crime and social control for individuals and society. Three of the sociology faculty (Dahaghi, Hirschfield, and Martinez-Schuldt) in this core cluster are also affiliated with the inter-disciplinary criminal justice program within the School of Arts and Sciences established in 2000. Robert Apel, Jody Miller, and Sara Wakefield, three faculty members from the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, are Affiliated Graduate Program Faculty.

The six Department of Sociology faculty members that presently comprise the cluster in crime and social control represent a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches. However, they share a distinctly sociological orientation, situating crime, whether in the form of adult offending, delinquency, or violence, in relation to inequalities and differences along the lines of race/ethnicity, class, gender, or geography. These scholars also examine social institutions both as sources of crime and deviance and as agents of prevention, control and suppression. Institutions, practices, and subjects of particular interest to faculty include urban communities (Dinzey-Flores and Martinez-Schuldt), civil and criminal courts (Dahaghi), urban policy and design (Dinzey-Flores), schools (Hirschfield, Shepherd), families (Phillips), peer groups (Shepherd), law enforcement (Hirschfield and Martinez-Schuldt), segregation, immigration, and ethno-racial inequality (Dinzey-Flores, Martinez-Schuldt, and Phillips), and non-government organizations (Dahaghi, Martinez-Schuldt).

The Sociology faculty conducting research in this area have assembled or help manage unique community-level, state, or national data sets that provide opportunities for graduate students to engage in research on the intersection of various social control institutions (schools, neighborhoods, police, courts, and juvenile justice) and crime. Cluster members have taught a variety of graduate courses related to crime, social control, and punishment and supervised several dissertations pertaining to such topics. Our graduate students have had success in winning university and national awards and in obtaining excellent placements upon graduation. At the undergraduate level, we offer a number of dynamic courses in the area of crime and social control as well as the opportunity to minor in criminology. Students who minor in criminology are particularly likely to encounter faculty in this cluster both in sociology courses and in criminal justice courses.

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