Welcome!
Welcome to the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis! If you are a sociology major or considering becoming a sociology major; if you are trying to decide where to attend graduate school; or if you hope to learn more about who our faculty are and what we do -- you've come to the right place.
We teach over 8,000 students each year and have about 600 majors. Our graduate program has approximately 70 full-time students. Sociology has 25 faculty members as well as faculty affiliates from departments around the campus, including Community and Regional Development, Ethnic Studies, African American and African Studies, and the Graduate School of Management.
Our core areas of research expertise revolve around critical studies of gender, race, and class; organizations, economic sociology, and work; immigration and globalization; law and society; culture; social psychology; and social movements and political sociology. We also have research strengths in medical sociology, and health and welfare policy.
Enjoy your exploration of UC Davis sociology!
Vicki Smith
Professor and Chair
News & Announcements
Raoul Liévanos awarded two research fellowships Raoul Liévanos has been awarded a UC Community Forestry and Environmental Research Partnerships (CFERP) Predissertation Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources in the amount of $2,000 for summer 2008. CFERP fellowships are highly competitive and open to graduate and undergraduate students from all over the U.S. The program goals are (1) to develop good participatory research skills in practitioners, (2) to nurture a new generation of scholars committed to engaging constructively with communities, and (3) to build community capacity to steward natural resources and have a voice in their own affairs. This predissertation fellowship will allow Liévanos to explore potential field sites for future research and will aid him as the current lead field researcher and project manager for the “Environmental Justice Coalition for Water Delta Health Study.” Funded additionally by the Rose Foundation and the UC Davis Environmental Justice Project, this project seeks to identify and assess the full range of environmental risks and concerns to human health resulting from poor water quality in the Delta, and sharing this information with participating communities, the broader public, and policy-makers in the Delta Vision Strategic Planning process.
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"Privileged Emotion Managers: The Case of Actors" by David Orzechowicz appears in Social Psychology Quarterly In the June 2008 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, this ethnographic piece considers the structural conditions under which actors engage in emotion management and challenges the long standing emphasis in the emotions literature on the ways organizations constrain people's abilities to evoke and suppress feelings. David argues that theatre provides actors with resources that enable feeling management. He identifies three structures - theatre's division of labor, the rehearsal process, and formal training - that give actors important advantages in managing emotions compared to many other social settings. These structures outsource some emotion management from actors to others involved in the production of a show and provide a set of institutionally prescribed strategies that actors use to manage feelings in a production.
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Dina Okamoto is the Recipient of the ASA Section on Asia and Asian America's Early Career Award Dina Okamoto was announced as the recipient of the ASA Section on Asia and Asian America's Early Career Award. The Section's Early Career Award recognizes a scholar in the early stage of her/his career (no more than 10 years post Ph.D. award date) and who is conducting exemplary research on the sociology of Asia or Asian American communities. Dina will receive her award at the ASA Meetings in Boston in August.
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Sarah Ovink Awarded National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant for 2008-09 The NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant is for Sarah's dissertation, tentatively entitled "Mexican-Americans and the College Attendance Gap."
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