Gain insight into social problems, social theory and social change through the Sociology department at HWS. An activist and change oriented department, you’ll learn and study contemporary social issues, such as power and inequality, community, social policy, criminology and criminal justice, organizational dysfunction, urban life, educational reforms, marriage, and the family. You’ll exit the program with a strong set of skills for asking and answering broad and narrow questions about social life.
Take your learning outside the classroom with community-based research and service learning. Using the City of Geneva as a resource, you’ll explore an issue that impacts our society in collaboration with your peers, faculty and community partners.
Study the Maori in New Zealand or inequality in Vietnam.
Wherever you go, you’ll apply classroom knowledge, develop cultural understanding and build global connections that expand your personal capacity and sense of purpose.
Ara McCorkle ’20 collaborated with Associate Professor of Sociology James Sutton in conducting interviews and analyzing student speeches. Ara contributed writing to Sutton’s final report on the exalt alternative to incarceration program for court-involved youth in New York City. The findings from their two pilot data collections point to numerous successes and suggest that exalt has a profound impact.
Sociology courses focus not only on the academic approaches to studying power and difference but also the practical processes of building community across categories of difference and contributing to organizations for social change.
Community based courses:
Courses that address power and difference:
Courses that address policy and organizational change:
Explore the disparities and social consequences of our time.
Explore through in-depth analysis the ways in which education in the United States, at times challenges and at times reproduces racial hierarchy.
Analyze the causes and consequences of alcohol use and misuse both in terms of its social construction in various cultural contexts as well as biochemical influences.
Examine power relationships that are inherent in deviance and social control, and it will additionally provide in-depth looks into how “deviants” experience deviance on a personal level.
Coming to college, Afrika’s goal was just to survive. Interested in policy, race and history, she initially wanted to be a Political Science major but after taking a Sociology class with Associate Professor Kendra Freeman, that changed.
