The Sociology Department at UC Santa Cruz fosters an intellectually open environment and a culture of collaboration that we gather around the terms public sociology, social justice, and social transformation. We use traditional as well as novel analytic strategies to stimulate creative intellectual, moral, and political responses to contemporary social questions of crisis and collapse of social worlds.  We engage the social world as it is, question the common sense on which it is built, and try to identify new cultural imaginaries, social practices, and conceptual maps with which to transform it. Our stress on public engagement and social justice means a commitment to multiple venues of engagement, sites of exchange, and means of circulating of our research.  Our department emphasizes core sub-fields like labor, environment, globalization, and urban sociology, and social movements, social inequality, and gender while cultivating new interdisciplinary conversations in areas such as affect studies and social movements, science and justice, gender and migration, digital technologies and justice. We practice styles of research and analysis that utilize comparative, interpretative, quantitative, ethnographic traditions.  We support our inquiries through research clusters and working groups and by encouraging research collaborations, conversation and learning among colleagues and students.