Sociology at UC Santa Cruz

We live in a world defined by rapid political, economic and cultural change.

Technology is shifting social relationships, political crises are challenging global boundaries, and climate change is reframing the built environment.

Sociology can distill the social action at play in this unraveling.

But any disciplinary distillation can be reductionist and limit our understanding of the world. Social problems do not exist in silos but in the tangled thread of the everyday experience.

At UCSC, we operate in the in-between spaces of inquiry. Our theoretical practice engages with process, our method fluid and agile to flow through academic disciplines and over theoretical boundaries.

We examine the texture of transformation. We explore how social realities are in a fluid state of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly. We address how sociology critically engages with, and grasps, these complexities.

We take scholarly leaps into the dynamics of social action: agency and governance, politics and mediation, identity and difference, social justice and ethics, democracy and sustainability, technologies and environment, affect and politics.   

For Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, these transgressive modes of research open new frontiers for research, new intersections for theory building and new possibilities for change.

Sociology is research for social justice.