Web Spotlight

Christina Ciocca Eller

Faculty Spotlight: Considering the Impacts of COVID-19 on Higher Education Inequality in the United States

June 1, 2020

Amid the unprecedented disruption of COVID-19, the 2019-2020 academic year has come to a close for most college and university students in the United States. Yet many are asking: now what? Higher education leaders are offering some answers, speaking to immediate concerns like whether teaching and learning will take place on colleges campuses come the fall, how financial arrangements will be handled, and what scaled-up virtual learning might look like.

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Ellis Monk

Faculty Spotlight: More Than Just Race: Skin Tone and the Criminal Justice System

April 1, 2020

For many decades now social scientists have shown how, in so many ways, one's ethnoracial background is associated with a whole host of important outcomes from educational attainment to labor market outcomes to health.  Many studies also provide compelling evidence of ethnoracial disparities in the criminal justice system – the probability of being arrested, incarcerated, and even the length of criminal sentences.  ... Read more about Faculty Spotlight: More Than Just Race: Skin Tone and the Criminal Justice System

Professor Paul Change, stands smiling in foreground wearing light blue button-up shirt, in background is greenery

Faculty Spotlight: The Rise of Non-Normative Households in South Korea

November 1, 2019

The dramatic transformation of family patterns in advanced capitalist societies has received much attention in both academia and the popular press. News coverage of family change in East Asia, especially, is fueling alarm and anxiety with frequent stories about how low-fertility rates are contributing to rapidly aging populations, an unsustainable trend given the fragility of pension programs specifically, and welfare systems generally.... Read more about Faculty Spotlight: The Rise of Non-Normative Households in South Korea

Ya-Wen Lei

Faculty Spotlight: Labor Contention in China’s Changing Economy

July 31, 2019

Although traditionally known as “the world’s factory,” China’s economy has changed immensely in recent years. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has been declining since 2012, whereas jobs in the service sector have been increasing. As the country’s economy and primary industries have changed, so too have its labor conflicts. Ya-Wen Lei, Assistant Professor of Sociology, investigates the labor organizing of drivers for China’s fast-growing food-delivery platforms.... Read more about Faculty Spotlight: Labor Contention in China’s Changing Economy

Escalators

Faculty Spotlight: The Production of Wealth Gaps between Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics

March 1, 2019
Harvard University Professor of Sociology Alexandra Killewald and Rice University Assistant Professor of Sociology Brielle Bryan argue in a recent post on the American Sociological Association's Work in Progress blog that racial and ethnic wealth disparities in the United States are the product of both legacies of disadvantage and inequality in contemporary achievement processes.

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Jason Beckfield signs books at launch of Political Sociology and the People's Health, held October 23, 2018 at the Harvard University Center for Population and Development Studies

Faculty Spotlight: Launching Political Sociology and the People's Health

December 4, 2018
A social epidemiologist looks at health inequalities in terms of the upstream factors that produced them. A political sociologist sees these same inequalities as products of institutions that unequally allocate power and social goods. Sociology Chair Jason Beckfield's new book asks an important question: can the two talk to one another? ... Read more about Faculty Spotlight: Launching Political Sociology and the People's Health
Michele Lamont stands in front of a lecturn

Faculty Spotlight: Lamont Presidential Lecture out in American Sociological Review

June 10, 2018

Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. Her term took an unexpected turn with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016: it befell on her to take a leadership role in defending the professional interests of sociologists and the conditions for academic freedom.... Read more about Faculty Spotlight: Lamont Presidential Lecture out in American Sociological Review

Professor Mary Brinton

Gender Inequality, Employment, and Family in Postindustrial Societies

May 1, 2018

Mary Brinton has been studying gender inequality for a long time, motivated in particular by the high level of gender inequality in Japan and other East Asian societies. Her current project considers gender inequality in light of what many social demographers consider a crisis of the family as an institution—namely, the emergence of historically low birth rates throughout the postindustrial world.... Read more about Gender Inequality, Employment, and Family in Postindustrial Societies

Making Sense of a Perplexing Country and an unwieldy Subject: Studies in the sociology of development and of modern-day trafficking and slavery

Making Sense of a Perplexing Country and an unwieldy Subject: Studies in the sociology of development and of modern-day trafficking and slavery

March 1, 2018

The Confounding Island: Institutions, Culture and Mis-Development in Post-Colonial Jamaica was just delivered to the press by Professor Orlando Patterson. This book examines one of the world’s most perplexing societies. Famous for the spectacular successes of its athletes and musicians, its vibrant democracy, and its religiosity, Jamaica is equally infamous for being among the world’s most violent places.... Read more about Making Sense of a Perplexing Country and an unwieldy Subject: Studies in the sociology of development and of modern-day trafficking and slavery