Mission
of the Department
Our mission is the creation of a learning environment that emphasizes the theme of Social Justice. Through coursework and research in the interest areas of criminal justice, environmental issues, political economy, and globalization, students develop an understanding of everyday social behavior as well as the structural factors that contribute to social injustice. From the classroom and the field, students acquire the intellectual tools to critically analyze social phenomena and trends, along with the methodological tools to conduct research and to evaluate social policy.
Note:
Each faculty member covers several research and teaching areas,
in sociology and/or criminology as well as adjacent disciplines.
This page provides information emphasizing the
department's three major areas of concentration.
For more information on faculty research interests
and teaching responsibilities, consult
the
individual
faculty members' departmental web-pages
(which also provide links to the personal pages of the faculty),
as well the Social Justice page.
Criminology
Hoan Bui Within the interest area of crime and criminal
justice Dr. Bui focuses on the effects of gender, race/ethnicity, and
immigration on crime, victimization, and criminal justice. Her research on
domestic violence explores the relationship between gender structure (male
dominance and the social construction of masculinity), race/ethnicity, culture,
and women’s experiences of intimate violence and criminal justice interventions.
Her research on delinquency and crime investigates the effects of economic
opportunities, neighborhood contexts (levels of concentrated
disadvantage/affluence), racial/ethnic segregations as well as immigration and
resettlement experiences on crime offending and victimization.
Ben Feldmeyer’s research focuses on criminal behavior and criminal sentencing and their intersection with race/ethnicity, social class, social context, and other demographic groups (i.e. age and gender). His work pays particular attention to the effects of structural conditions on violent offending across race/ethnicity (particularly among Latinos) and addresses such questions as: (1) Do structural conditions like poverty and disadvantage have similar effects on violence across race/ethnicity, (2) How does segregation influence violence in black and Latino communities, and (3) What effect (if any) does immigration have on violence among Latinos? Dr. Feldmeyer’s current work includes an analysis comparing the effects of racial/ethnic residential isolation on violence among black and Latino populations. His second current project examines the immigration-violence relationship among Latinos. This project pays particular attention to the indirect effects of immigration violence in order to identify potential stabilizing/destabilizing effects of immigration on Latino communities. Recent work also includes an analysis of racial threat effects in federal sentencing outcomes – i.e., addressing whether black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in sentence length decisions are shaped by the racial/ethnic contexts of the court caseload and the general population of the federal district.
Lois Presser’s research interests include critical
issues in criminological theory; the theory and practice of restorative justice;
and qualitative methodology. She studies how offenders talk about their lives,
their crimes and their experiences of justice. Currently, Dr. Presser is writing
a book on the life stories of violent men and is collaborating with students on
projects concerning power and efforts to achieve justice.
Wornie L. Reed was trained as a medical sociologist under a health services research training fellowship. Dr. Reed has taught courses, conducted research and published numerous articles on medical care, health and illness, urban communities, education, and criminal and juvenile justice. His background includes positions in the federal government and private industry as well as higher education. Before his academic career, Dr. Reed spent 12 years in the computer field with the U.S. Bureau of the Census as a computer programmer and with IBM as a systems engineer and as a marketing representative.
Neal
Shover explores issues of white-collar crime and the regulatory
process. His most recent research examined the pursuits and careers of criminal
telemarketers and responses to a new system of tax oversight by small building
and construction firms in Australia. His research has been supported by a
variety of external agencies. Published in 2001, his most recent book, co-edited
with John Paul Wright, is Crimes of Privilege. His Doing Deals and
Making Mistakes, co-authored with Andy Hochstetler, will be published by
Cambridge University Press in 2005.
Environmental Sociology
Sherry Cable's research interests are in environmental
sociology with particular emphasis on environmental conflicts and environmental
movements. Recent publications include: an article with Tom Shriver (PhD UT) and
Amy Chasteen (MA UT) on women's participation in the Gulf War Illness movement
in The Sociological Quarterly; an article with Tammy Mix (PhD UT) on the
American apartheid system in Journal of Black Studies; and an article
with Mix and UT colleague Chip Hastings on the roles of activists, researchers,
and lawyers in the Environmental Justice movement in Human Ecology
Review. Cable's book, Environmental Problems/Grassroots Solutions
(1995, St. Martin's Press) is currently being revised for a second edition. She
is currently working on two other books: Democracy, Institutional Failure,
and Globalization: A Sociological Analysis of Environmental Policy, and
Dissent and Social Control Networks in Democratizing Nations: The Suppression
of Environmental Protest in the Czech Republic with
Shriver.
R. Scott Frey’s substantive research interests
are best described as falling under the interrelated areas of public policy,
environment, and social change and development. His work has appeared in a
variety of journals, including the American Journal of Sociology and the
American Sociological Review. His recent work centers on risk and
globalization issues, including the documentation of the export of core-based
hazardous industries, products, and wastes to the less developed countries by
transnational corporations. This work has appeared in various outlets, including
Third World Quarterly, the Journal of World-Systems Research, the
Journal of Developing Societies, and several edited volumes such as the
Handbook of Environmental Sociology (edited by Dunlap and Michelson) and
Space and Transport in the World-System (edited by Ciccantell and
Bunker). He also examines the determinants of alternative forms of development
from an empirical, cross-national perspective (recent papers have centered on
democracy and human well-being, environmental sustainability, human rights
provision, and infant mortality, appearing in journals such as the
Sociological Spectrum, Human Ecology Review, Social Indicators
Research). His recent book, The Environment and Society Reader
(published by Allyn and Bacon), brings these interrelated interests together
in a work on the human dimensions of environmental problems. He is currently
working on a book examining how and why hazardous products, production
processes, and wastes are exported to less developed countries. Frey has
conducted research supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ford
Foundation. This latter research has centered on environmental and public policy
issues, including health and safety risks associated with agricultural
production, natural resource depletion issues surrounding irrigation, and
community development efforts in rural areas of the High Plains region of the
United States.
Paul K. Gellert's areas of interest include the political economy of natural resource commodities; conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the so-called “nature-society” divide; and epistemological and theoretical debates in development theory. I arrived at UT in Fall 2005, after spending a research year in Indonesia and Japan examining the changing domestic and international politics of Asian timber markets in a period of post-authoritarian decentralization and neo-liberalism. From the focus on timber, secondly, I have become fascinated with how sociologists might analyze “socionature” and transformations of landscapes by megaprojects from urban infrastructure to conversion of forests into oil palm plantations. Finally, I am interested in development theory and epistemology, including the suggestive, non-universalist possibilities in Amartya Sen’s notion of capability and its achievement through democratic deliberation.
Robert E.
Jones has an interdisciplinary education in the social and natural
sciences, and his work examines the human dimensions of environmental change and
ecosystem management. He is a Research Associate with Energy, Environment, and
Resources Center and the Southeast Water Policy Initiative. He also has worked
on funded projects related to the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone,
salmon restoration in the Pacific Northwest, water recreation in the Columbia
River Basin, hazardous waste management in the State of Washington,
amenity-migration in Southern Appalachia, public support for the environment in
the United States and Southern Appalachia, and research related to environmental
justice and race. These projects have generated a number of theses and
dissertations as well as collaborative efforts with graduate students in paper
presentations and published articles.
Immigration
Stephanie A. Bohon's work focuses primarily on the migration and settlement of Latinos to the
Southeastern United States, an area where Latino populations have doubled in all
but three states. Her work in the area addresses two primary questions: 1) What
are the barriers that Latinos encounter when attempting to adapt to their new
environment, and 2) How have communities reacted to the influx of people with
different phenotypes, customs, and languages?
Political Economy
Harry F. Dahms works in the areas of theory, economic
sociology, political economy, and comparative sociology. While his substantive
interests relate to globalization, the role of economic organizations, and
cross-national variations of business-labor-government interrelations, he is
especially concerned with how classical, contemporary and critical (neo-Marxist,
postmodernist, feminist) theorists prepared the analysis of modern societies,
for both social order and social process. Framing globalization as the
culmination of contradictory trends that have been shaping modern societies, his
current work concentrates on opportunities to make explicit how in sociology,
and social research more generally, a shift in orientation is necessary from
efforts to arrive at "correct answers" to given questions (as formulated during
the twentieth century) to an emphasis on "question" to determining the most
central concerns of sociology in the 21st century. To do so, he
regards as the defining challenge of our age, the need to envision how all
contributions to the theory of modern society provide fragments of a narrative
that has never been told--and that the time has come to put the pieces together,
and to tell the story. Recent and forthcoming publications include
“Globalization as Hyper-Alienation: Critiques of Traditional Marxism as
Arguments for Basic Income,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 23
2004; “Does Alienation Have a Future? Recapturing the Core of Critical
Theory,” in Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium: The Evolution of
Alienation, ed. L. Langman and D. K.. Fishman (Rowman and Littlefield,
2004); "Sociology in the Age of Globalization: Toward a Dynamic Sociological
Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory,21, 2001;
Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and the State in Modern
Times (editor), (New York: NYU Press; London: Macmillan, 2000); A Dynamic
Theory of Modern Capitalism: Schumpeter's Economic Sociology of
Entrepreneurship, Series: "Contradictions of Modernity," University of
Minnesota Press (forthcoming). Among the projects in preparation is a
sociological theory textbook, using THE MATRIX movies as the foil for
introducing students to classical, contemporary, and critical theories, starting
out from the proposition that to fully appreciate the message underlying the
movies, they must be related to the immediate present--and to the contradictions
of modernity. Thus, the movies appear as an attempt to convey to audiences how
the current state of race relations continues to be to most visible
manifestation of alienation, and how efforts to overcome alienation, by
implementing public policies directed toward that goal, with fail as long as
they neglect to tackle, pro-actively, the state of alienating race relations, in
addition to gender and class.
Steven P. Dandaneau's current work focuses on C. Wright Mills: Last Years, Late Work; his research and teaching interests comprise social theory, political economy, and community.
Asafa Jalata's research agenda is focused on investigating and
understanding the dynamic interplay between the racialized/ethnicized and
exploitative global and regional economic structures and the human agency of the
colonized/ indigenous peoples. He has been identifying and explaining the
chains of historical and political economic forces shaping racial/ ethnonational
inequality, development and underdevelopment, and national and social movements
on global, regional, and local levels. Specifically, for the last twenty
years, he has been researching and exploring the relationship between the
colonization and incorporation of Oromia, the Oromo country, into the Ethiopian
Empire and the global capitalist system and the development of the Oromo
national movement.
To link
his regional research activities with his larger research agenda, he has located
the Oromo question in the global context. His book, Oromia &
Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-1992 (1993), his
edited book, Oromo nationalism and the Ethiopian Democracy: The Search of
Freedom and Democracy (1998), and other publications demonstrate the
relationship among local, regional, and global issues. He has extended the
scope of his research to include the Horn of Africa and North America. His
new book, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization:
Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (2001), and his articles, "Ethnonationalism and the Global ‘Modernizing’ Project" (2001), "Two
Liberation Movements Compared: Oromia & Souther Sudan," (2000), “Revisiting the Black Struggle: Lessons for the twenty-first Century,” and
“Comparing the African American and the Oromo Movements in the global Context,”
Vol. 30, No. 1, 2003: 67-111, demonstrate this geographical breadth.
Further, in his new edited book, State
Crises, Globalisation, and National Movements in North-East of Africa,
(2004), he extends his scholarship and expertise beyond Oromia, Ethiopia, Sudan,
and Black America to the broader geopolitical region and sociocultural area of
North-East Africa. He is currently engaged in research to write a book
entitled, Faces of Terrorism in the Age of Globalization: From Christopher
Columbus to Osma bin Laden.
His research pays close attention to the roles of the indigenous
peoples in the racialized global capitalist system, and how the agencies of
these peoples are affecting the structures and the dynamics of the system.
The uniqueness and strength of his contributions are that he seriously engages
scholars and politicians of various theoretical orientations to understand the
main reasons why subjugated peoples are involved in cultural and political
struggles. He has already consolidated his scholarly stature among national and
international scholars as a leading sociologist/social scientist in the fields
of Oromo and Africana studies. In recognition of his contribution to Oromo
scholarship, he received the Oromo Studies Association Award in 2002.
Jon Shefner's research is centered on the political economy
of development, a sub-field that focuses on explaining different developmental
trajectories and global stratification. His work is multidisciplinary, drawing
from anthropology, economics, and political science, as well as sociology. He
has conducted extensive qualitative research in Guadalajara and Jalisco, Mexico,
and New Orleans, LA. He is interested in detailing how poor people push for
political change, and the limitations they are subjected to in their efforts
toward greater self-determination. He is particularly interested in the links
poor people hold – either forged by themselves, or imposed on them – with other
social groups. The interaction of organized poor people’s movements with groups
representing interests of the state, elites, or middle classes, have important
implications for how far poor people’s political efforts are able to
proceed.
Social Psychology
Suzanne Kurth’s research program focuses on the
characteristics of social interactions and how those interactions constitute
interpersonal relationships. She currently is engaged in observationally
informed theorizing about the impact of technologically mediated interaction
(particularly mobile phone communication) on social relationships. Increasing
involvement in mobile phone and computer-mediated communication by more segments
of the population poses challenges to conceptualizations of private and public
spaces, normative expectations governing face-to-face interaction, and to
previous conceptualizations of the impact of physical proximity on relationship
formation and maintenance. Another current thread of her social relationship
research critiques researchers’ social construction of the relationships of
women prisoners as imitative of kin relations.
Updated 2-8-2007
