Research conducted by Department of Sociology faculty can be organized into thematic clusters that represent our department's collective strengths and its multifaceted contributions to sociological knowledge. Below are the thematic clusters and the faculty who align with them.
Department of Sociology Thematic Clusters
Demography/Sociology of Population
This cluster focuses on social demographic analysis of population dynamics, grounded in the three traditional strands of demography (fertility, migration, and mortality). Research examines how demographic processes are linked with the dynamics of aging and educational, employment, family, and health states and transitions, with particular attention given to group differences in population outcomes.
Cluster Faculty
Globalization, Comparative and Historical Sociology
The overarching focus of this research cluster is interrelations among state, market, civil society, religion, and globalization. This cluster examines global patterns of inequality, social movements, migration, development, and ideological and cultural change.
Cluster Faculty
Social Psychology, Identity, and Social Interaction
This cluster explores the micro-level dynamics of social life that underpin broader sociological phenomena. Faculty work explicitly links micro-level social psychological processes—such as identity threats, gender attitudes, social networks, and institutionalized bias—to the reproduction and experience of macro-level social inequalities, including legal rights, health disparities, and organizational power dynamics.
Cluster Faculty
Families
This cluster reflects a deep specialization in the family as a social institution. It examines how family is constructed through individual, interactional, and institutional practices and structures. An emphasis on identifying the demographic, normative, economic, and political mechanisms that reinforce inequality across families, race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality is a binding thread of the area. Theoretical approaches include structural perspectives and micro-interactional social psychological perspectives. Methodological approaches include demographic and advanced statistical methods, qualitative interviews, and ethnography and mixed methods.
Cluster Faculty
Health across the Life Course
This cluster focuses on the social and structural determinants of health. Research in this cluster investigates how systemic inequalities, social conditions and contexts, and institutional structures shape health outcomes among different population subgroups. An emphasis is placed on examining how these disparities change as people age. Health disparities are explored through various lenses: demographic methods, social psychological processes, and institutional analyses, with particular attention to how social statuses–such as race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality–and social conditions, such as neighborhood environments, influence health across the life course.
Cluster Faculty
Intersectional Social and Economic Inequalities
This cluster focuses on the causes and consequences of inequality, on the national and global level. It emphasizes intersectionality in stratification systems, particularly institutional dimensions of social problems and policy solutions across diverse contexts, including family, the military, labor markets, education, and criminal-legal systems. The area focuses on social and economic inequalities, with particular attention to how social statuses–such as race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality–and social conditions jointly shape people’s life outcomes.
Cluster Faculty
