Welcome to the Department of Sociology

Our Programs

Sociology at Arizona has a history of excellence in research and teaching, and has long been a wellspring of innovation in theory and methods.

Sociology explores and analyzes issues vital to our own lives, our communities, our nation, and the world. The undergraduate major provides a foundation for careers in many professional fields, and for graduate training as a sociologist in academia, government, business, or community agencies. Learn More ...

Our graduate training prepares students for careers in research and teaching. The Department is widely recognized as one of the top programs in the United States. Our faculty includes senior members who are nationally and internationally acknowledged authorities in their fields, and some of the best young scholars in the country. Learn More ...

Departmental News

** 2010 NRC Rankings **
From the 5th percentile of the NRC R-rankings, The Department of Sociology captures a #8 slot among sociology programs in the country. Relative R rankings also shows our department coming in at #3 across all units in the University of Arizona.

** US News and World Report Rankings **
The Department of Sociology's Social Psychology program was ranked #6 in the nation. It was one of only 13 programs at the University of Arizona, and the only social science program, ranked in the top 10.

The inaugural Arizona Methods Workshop was a big success! See pics on Arizona Sociology's Facebook page.

Jane Zavisca's book manuscript "Housing the New Russia" is under contract with Cornell University Press and will be in print by the end of 2011.

Charles Ragin was elected to Council of the ASA Methodology Section.

Lane Kenworthy's chapter "Labor Market Activation" appeared in the Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Henry A. Walker's book, Building Experiments: Testing Social Theory, (with David Willer, University of South Carolina) has been published in Chinese by Chongqing University Press, May 2010.

Celestino Fernandez recently won the John David Arnold National Humanitarian and Service Award, the Cox Communications: Arizona Hispanic Man of the Year award and the LULAC Community Service Award.

Scott Eliason has been invited to be on the American Sociological Review editorial board. He joins Joseph Galaskiewicz, Erin Leahey, Charles Ragin, and Henry Walker, giving UA Sociology five members on the ASR board.

Don Grant published "Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production" in the American Sociological Review (with Mary Nell Trautner, Liam Downey, and Lisa Thiebaud). (2010 75:479-504).

Robin Stryker has been awarded an Earl H. Carroll Magellan Circle Fellowship, was elected Chair of the ASA Political Sociology Section, and was invited to be a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris May-June 2011.

Ronald Breiger published "Cultural Holes: Beyond Relationality in Social Networks and Culture" in the Annual Review of Sociology 2010 (with Mark A. Pachucki, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco & Berkeley).

Jeff Sallaz's book, "The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Afirca," received the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the ASA's Section on Labor and Labor Movements. He also received a 2011 Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship for study in southeast Asia.

Charles Ragin published the second edition of Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method, with Lisa Amoroso (July 2010). He also recently presented workshops on Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Fuzzy Sets at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-Irvine, Syracuse University, and the 2010 meetings of the ASA.

Erin Leahey, Charles Ragin, and Cindy Cain have been awarded a 2-year grant from the National Science Foundation for their project "Recipes for Scientific Success," to begin in May 2011. Their research applies fsQCA to data derived from essays written by highly influential scientists to understand the multiple ingredients and multiple pathways to scientific success.

Robin Stryker has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation, Law and Social Sciences Division (#SES 1051374) to host two international and interdisciplinary conferences on "Rights and Their Translation into Practice: Toward a Synthetic Framework." The first will be held April 22-24, 2011, at the Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. The second will be held at UA in April, 2012

Ronald Breiger (principal investigator) was awarded a $1.08 million grant funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Breiger, along with Brinton Milward, director of the UA School of Government and Public Policy, and investigators from two other universities (The University at Albany-SUNY, and the START Center at the University of Maryland), seeks to enhance and leverage existing open-source datasets relevant to violent non-state actors in order to develop new analytic tools to model human networks engaged in the pursuit of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons.

Ronald Breiger, along with Paul Cohen (head, UA Department of Computer Science) and Brinton Milward (director, UA School of Government and Public Policy), are co-principal investigators on a five-year, five-university, $7.5-million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant awarded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The purpose of the grant is to advance research that infers structure and forecasts dynamics on evolving networks. The principal investigator is P. Jeffrey Brantingham of UCLA.