We tend to think of social movements as promoters of social change, but might they also be key agents in maintaining—and even reinforcing—the status quo? Harvard professor Jocelyn Viterna, with graduate student Bo Yun Park and undergraduate students Quinn Sluzenski, Enya Huang, and Bryant Park, are examining hundreds of press releases from 10 oppositional “pairs” of U.S. social movements (e.g., gun rights vs gun control, anti-abortion rights vs pro-abortion rights, etc) to examine this question. Building from existing social movement theory, our team hypothesizes that all

Shai M. Dromi, Harvard College Fellow in Sociology, received an honorable mention from the ASA Comparative-Historical Section's 2017 Theda Skocpol Best Dissertation Award committee. Read more about Dromi project receives honorable mention for Best Dissertation Award

Christopher Bail (Ph.D. 2011), Douglas and Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Sociology, and Philip Napoli, James R. Shepley Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University, are among this year’s Andrew Carnegie Fellows. Read more about Christopher Bail chosen as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow

"[Sociology] may not have the ear of presidents but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced nations in recent years."  Read more about What if Sociologists had as much influence as Economists?

People living in the United States today live lives that are sicker and end earlier than people living in other high-income countries.  The facts are described in two recent reports [https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13497/us-health-in-international-perspective-

Conventional wisdom imagines political life in authoritarian contexts to be bleak and suffocating, and popular understandings of China are no exception. Nonetheless, since the mid-2000s, a nationwide contentious public sphere has developed in China—providing an unprecedented forum for Chinese citizens to influence the public agenda and demand government accountability.

The Chinese state has increasingly, if reluctantly, come to recognize this emergent public sphere as a force it must reckon with, but it is important not to overstate the stability or permanence of this political space