Welcome to UB's Department of Sociology

Please pardon the cyberdust as the Department website is updated over the next few weeks. Our department is on the move in many ways, with changes happening so quickly that it is hard to keep up with our vibrant department culture, productive faculty, and talented graduate students. In the meantime, as we revamp this site, my colleagues and I would like you to know this is a great place to work and study, and we encourage you to contact any of us directly if you have questions about our Department.

Debi Street, Professor and Chair  

 

Recent Department Accomplishments


Ellen Berrey has an article co-authored with Steve Hoffman and Laura Beth Nielsen titled “Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation” forthcoming this spring in the Law & Society Review. Also this spring, she will give talks on her book manuscript, Bottom-Line Diversity: Race and Productive Pluralism in the Post-Civil Rights Era, at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California-Berkeley and in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University.

Robert Granfield was appointed as a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore, School of Law. His article "The Elephant That No One Sees: Natural Recovery among Middle-Class Addicts" from the Journal of Drug Issues was printed in the book, Drugs and American Dream (Wiley Blackwell, 2012).  His article "Making It by Faking It:  Working Class Students in an Elite Academic Environment,” from the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, was republished in two books: Understanding Society: An Introductory Reader, (Cengage, 2012) and Mapping the Social Landscape (McGraw Hill, 2012).  He has a forthcoming article to be published in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement.

Mark Gottdiener’s text book, The New Urban Sociology, was recently translated into Chinese and published legally in that country in an agreement with his American publisher. As the first urban text from the West to be translated, the publisher is expecting significant sales.

Erin Hatton has just heard that her book "The Temp Economy" won the Honorable Mention Award from the American Sociological Association Labor Movements Secion 2012 Book Award.  She published two articles with Mary Nell Trautner, “Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone” and “Images of Powerful Women in the Age of ‘Choice Feminism’” forthcoming in Sexuality and Culture and the Journal of Gender Studies, respectively. She is a Civic Engagement fellow this year, and she has been awarded a Humanities Institute Fellowship for next year.  She also was asked to give a talk at the New York State meeting of the American Association of University Women in Rochester in April of this year.

Steve Hoffman published “The New Tools of the Science Trade: Contested Knowledge Production and the Conceptual Vocabularies of Academic Capitalism” in the November 2011 issue of Social Anthropology. The article is highlighted with response essays from social theorists Cris Shore, University of Auckland, and George E. Marcus, University of California at Irvine, along with Hoffman’s reply. Hoffman also co-authored a paper with Ellen Berrey and another one with Mary Nell Trautner and doctoral student Daniel Nickolai. He presented his research as a keynote speech to an organizational ethnography workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, and by invitation to the UC Davis School of Management.

In December 2011, Kristen Lee had an article published with Elaine Howard Ecklund titled "Atheists and Agnostics Negotiate Religion and Family" in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Christopher Mele recently published “Casinos, Prisons, Incinerators and Other Fragments of Neoliberal Urban Development” in the Fall 2011 issue of Social Science History.

Debra Street was promoted from Associate Professor of Sociology to Full Professor on August 2011. She received the 2011 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Debra Street is a visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College in London at the Institute of Gerontology for 2011-2013. She has an article (along with Stephanie Burge) “Residential Context, Social Relationships, and Subjective Well-Being in Assisted Living,” in the journal Research on Aging. Debra Street has another article (along with Victor Molinari and Donna Cohen) "State Regulations for Nursing Home Residents with Serious Mental Illness," forthcoming in the Community Mental Health Journal.

Robert Wagmiller published the article “Why Did Urban Poverty Become Less Concentrated in the 1990s?” in Social Science Quarterly. Also, he gave an invited talk on April 20th at Cornell University's Cornell Population Center. The title of his talk is “How Do the Residential Experiences of Recent Cohorts of Blacks and Whites Differ from Past Cohorts? A Cohort-Based Approach to Studying Change in Racial Residential Integration.”


Please click here to read our archived accomplishments.