About
Areas of Specialization
The current research pursued by Pitt sociologists is focused in the program's three areas of specialization: Social Movements; Global and Comparative Sociology; and Gender, Race and Class.
Social Movements
Everywhere we look in the twenty-first century, we find efforts at change and efforts to resist change. Faculty and graduate students at Pitt are studying a variety of past and present social movements in the United States and worldwide. Our department is home to the Pittsburgh Social Movement Forum, a setting for discussions of new ideas in social-movement studies, lectures, presentations of student and faculty work-in-progress and book discussions among scholars from various Departments and Universities in the Pittsburgh area. The Pittsburgh Social Movement Forum also sponsors speakers and mini-conferences on major social-movement issues. Our recent emphases have been on state repression of social movements; global labor organizing; race and collective action in prisons; emotions in social movement research; Eastern European and democratization movements; sexual minority movements; and global Anti-Semitic movements.
Global and Comparative Sociology
We are living in a global age where national experiences extend beyond conventional borders and territories. We are more connected with one another, and influenced by one another across nation-states. To learn about our interconnections is to live wisely in this century. Global and comparative sociology is essential knowledge in the twenty-first century.
While we experience this growing interconnectedness, the very process is simultaneously creating more global disparities and inequalities, not only across national boundaries, but also by race, ethnicity, class, and gender within nations. Our faculty explore the cultural, political and economic conditions of this age, with emphasis on social and political movements, cultural transformations, collective memory of war and violence, global culture, slavery and post-plantation societies, social inequalities, and anti-Semitism.
Faculty and graduate students working in this field cover a wide variety of settings and networks spanning France, Germany, Poland, India, Nepal, Japan, China, South Korea, Romania, Slovakia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominica, Namibia, and South Africa.
Gender, Race, and Class
Both classical sociological theory and some of the most intellectually exciting contemporary research is rooted in the study of the dynamics of social inequalities. Social relations of gender, race, and class shape social change, social institutions, and the everyday experiences of social life.
Faculty and students working in Pitt’s GRC program use a variety of methodological approaches to understand structured social inequalities, including social demography, socio-historical research, discourse analysis, ethnographies, surveys, life history interviewing, and policy analysis.