The point, after all, is to change the world.
When we started graduate school at Berkeley in 2020, many things were uncertain. We were part of the first, and quite possibly the last, cohort to start entirely virtually in the Sociology department, during a tumultuous historical period where one crisis seemed to bleed into the next in a compounding effect – an ongoing global […]
In 1974, I arrived at Stony Brook University as a sociology PhD student. I chose Stony Brook because Lewis Coser was a prominent conflict theorist on the faculty. Those theorists were hard to find because sociology was still under the enormous influence of structural functionalism. I was interested in conflict and change because I had […]
Introduction: When we decided to pivot the Berkeley Journal of Sociology to public sociology, we had to take stock of what was done before us. To guide us in our own project of relaunching a public sociology journal platform, we sought out resources for academic social scientists to translate their research to the public in […]
Abstract How can documentary strategies advance sociological insights beyond academia? This photo-essay analyzes the process of producing the documentary film “Una Escuela llamada América” with immigrant children in Arica – the northernmost city in North Chile, only 20 kilometers south from the frontier with Peru. We reflect upon the documentary’s production and its relationship with […]
In theory, being arrested by the FBI and charged with insider trading would be a bad thing to happen to someone running for Congress. Such was the situation upstate New York incumbent Chris Collins found himself in a few months before the 2018 election. And yet Collins, the first representative to endorse Trump, went on […]
When I began graduate school at UC Berkeley in 2014, talk of “public sociology” was in the air. Although neither I nor the other graduate students around me seemed to know exactly what this meant, this did not prevent me from taking inspiration —and license— from my new department’s commitment to it. I reached out […]
The COVID-19 crisis has activated two sides of our current biopolitical order. On the one hand, a mix of governmental organizations and private firms have developed public health measures to address the pandemic and its consequences at multiple social scales: from shelter-in-place ordinances at the state level, mask production and distribution, to vaccine requirements for […]
How did a group of students who “would rather be teaching,” come to organize, sustain, and finally emerge as victors in a campus-wide movement? This photo-essay analyzes the role of emotions, injustice framing, and interaction rituals in a successful graduate student labor movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Berkeley Journal of Sociology is seeking submissions. Our aim is to provide critical perspectives from the social sciences on public debates and current events as well as critical reviews of social scientific knowledge. Please circulate this call.
This article analyzes the recent #MeToo campaign through the lens of the notions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, formulated by Miranda Fricker as the two most typical instances of epistemic injustice.
Stepnitz argues that the waning relevance of current refugee law creates a space in which the legal conception of the refugee can and must be challenged. Through the work of the Berlin-based Center for Political Beauty, she explores one way in which art offers an alternative vision in which refugees are rearticulated first and foremost as human and welcome.