News & Events

Alumni Profiles

At an early age, Marjorie Kossoy Fuhrmann, CCAS ’73, was taught to serve others, and her education at GW enhanced her ability to impact the world on a greater scale.

Jacqueline Groccia earned a BA in criminal justice and an MA in criminology from GW in 2018 and 2019, respectively. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology at the Johns Hopkins University, where she is part of the research team at the Johns Hopkins Poverty and Inequality Research Lab studying housing and educational inequality.

Upcoming Events

Immigrant Selectivity and Diverse Patterns of Integration: Chinese and Indian Immigrants in Los Angeles | Min Zhou, Professor of Sociology & Asian American Studies, Walter & Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in US-China Relations & Communications, and Director of the Asia Pacific Center at UCLA
Thursday, March 26, 3-4:30 p.m. | Gelman Library, Churchill Room
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO COVID-19-RELATED UNIVERSITY CLOSURES.

Course Registration: Summer 2020!

Registration for Summer 2020 begins March 2 for students. For our full course listings, go to the GW Schedule for both on campus and online courses, and the GW Registrar site for registration dates. Also, be sure to visit our Academics webpages for details regarding degree requirements.

Recent Events

The Changing World and Sociological Significance of Workforce Credentials | Stephen Crawford, research professor at the GW Institute of Public Policy, and Kyle Albert, assistant research professor at the GW Institute of Public Policy | March 4, 2020

Somos de Langley Park: The Fight for Fair Redevelopment Along Maryland's Purple Line | Willow Lung-Amam, Associate Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program & Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, College Park | February 19, 2020

Bottom-Up Politics: What Do We Know and Where Do We Need to Go? | March 6, 2019

Dean's Lecture Series on Emerging Scholarship in Criminology

The End is Near: Shifting Police-Community-Drug Dealer Relationships in the Olympic Favela | Stefanie Israel de Souza, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at University of Notre Dame | October 18, 2018

The Limits of Resonant Frames: Organizational Mobilization Against Racially Biased Policing in France & the United States | Nicole Hirsch, Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Southern California | October 25, 2018

Dialog and (Dis) Order Keeping: Police Organizational Sensemaking in Stockholm, Sweden & Oakland, California | Carlos Bustamante, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Sociology, State University of New York, Albany | November 1, 2018

Violence in America: Explaining Hate Crimes Against Latinos in the 21st Century | Janice Iwama, Assistant Professor of Criminology, American University | November 8, 2018

Sociological Lens on Eastern Europe: Gender, Collective Memory, and Social Inequality with Profs. Daina Eglitis, Michelle Kelso, and Steve Tuch

November 5, 2018 | Elliot School of International Affairs

The presenters provided an overview of their recent research in Latvia, Romania, and Poland. They discussed the significance of turning a sociological lens on both historical and contemporary issues in the region, including the Holocaust, World War II, and post-communist experiences of capitalism and socioeconomic stratification.

"Going All City: A Graffiti Writer's Autoethnography" Tuesday, October 30, 2018 | Stefano Bloch

Stefano Bloch is a former Los Angeles-based graffiti writer and current Assistant Professor in the School of Geography & Development and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory and faculty affiliate with the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona.

Bottom-Up Politics

April 12, 2018 | Wilson Center

The Urban Sustainability Laboratory, George Washington University Seminar on Bottom Up Politics and the Metropolitan Policy Center of the School of Public Affairs at American University held a symposium that brought together a panel of experts to identify the processes of engagement by which local groups take up collective responses to community-level problems. For more information, please click here.

The Salvadorian Willie Horton? MS-13, Crimmigration, and the Translation of Gang Intelligence

On November 6th Ken Leon presented "The Salvadorian Willie Horton? MS-13, Crimmigration, and the Translation of Gang Intelligence" as part of the Dean's Lecture Series on Race, Ethnicity, and Criminal Justice. Click here for more information.

Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, & Wraparound Incarceration

On October 23rd Jerry Flores presented "Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, & Wraparound Incarceration" as part of the Dean's Lecture Series on Race, Ethnicity, and Criminal Justice. Click here for more details.

Tally's Corner Revisited: A Half Century of Change in African-American Washington and Beyond

On October 19th, the Department of Sociology held a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of GW Alumnus Elliot Liebow's classic ethnography of African-American street-corner men in DC, Tally's Corner. To watch the recording of the event, please click here. For information about the event, please click here.

In Memoriam

The Department lost a dear friend with the passing of Ruth Wallace on March 2, 2016. Ruth was an integral part of Sociology at GW where she taught for 31 years. And she was a giant in the field of sociology in the US and around the world. Through her many books, journal articles, public lectures, and other venues she was a pioneering voice in sociological theory, gender, and religion. Among her publications were the following books: They Call Him Pastor: Married Men in Charge of Catholic Parishes, Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition, (co-authored with Alison Wolf), Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists. (coedited with Kathryn Meadow Orlans), They Call Her Pastor: A New Role for Catholic Women. and Feminism and Sociological Theory. Among the many awards she won were the American Sociological Association's Jessie Bernard Award for scholarly work on the role of women in society, the District of Columbia Sociological Society's Stuart Rice Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sociology, the Religious Research Association's H. Paul Douglass Lecturer, Marquette University's Joseph McGee Lecturer, and Santa Clara University's Distinguished Visiting Scholar. She will be missed by everyone who had the opportunity to know her. -- Greg Squires

Recent Faculty Books

Happiness is the Wrong Metric. Amitai Etzioni. Springer Open. 2018.

Forthcoming. The Fight for Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act. Gregory D. Squires (ed). Routledge, 2018.

Meltdown: The Financial Crisis, Consumer Protection, and the Road Forward. Larry Kirsch and Gregory D. Squires. Praeger, 2017.

Privacy in a Cyber Age: Policy and Practice. Amitai Etzioni. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

The New Normal: Finding a Balance between Individual Rights and the Common Good. Amitai Etzioni. Transaction Publishers, 2014.

Discover Sociology. William J. Chambliss and Daina S. Eglitis. Sage, 2013.

Faculty News

Fran Buntman is very busy on sabbatical in 2017-2018. She began her sabbatical by completing a paper on Prisons, Law, Repression, and Resistance based on her earlier keynote address to the International Conference on Colonial Incarceration in the 20th Century in Lisbon, Portugal. She gave papers in New York and Austin, Texas about prison and resistance in honor of and memory of Dr. Barbara Harlow, one of her mentors. She has extended her involvement in local DC criminal justice issues, including to give testimony to the DC Council about needs for the DC jail.

Robert Cottrol published The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere (University of Georgia Press, Studies in the Legal History of the South series, 2013) and "Positive Discrimination/Affirmative Action with Respect to Gender and Race," (co-author Megan Davis) in Routledge Handbook of Constitutional Law, edited by Mark Tushnet, Thomas Fleiner and Cheryl Saunders (Routledge, 2013).

Cynthia Deitch received a Community Based Participatory Research grant for 2015-2016 from the GW Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service. In collaboration with the DC Ceneter for Employment Justice, she will be conducting research on the DC paid sick leave law.

Daina Eglitis recently published the third edition of her introductory textbook, Discover Sociology (Sage, 2017), which was recently awarded the 2018 Textbook & Academic Authors Association Textbook Excellence Award. In 2016, she co-authored (with colleagues Fran Buntman and Dameon Alexander) the article, “Social Issues and Problem-based Learning in Sociology: Opportunities and Challenges in the Undergraduate Classroom,” which was published in Teaching Sociology.

Hiromi Ishizawa returned to GW in Fall 2016 from her sabbatical in Japan. She has continued to work on civic engagement among immigrants in the US. In Summer 2016, she presented a research project at the ASA with a former graduate student, Renee Stepler (Pew Research Center), titled, “Immigrant voices: How do patterns of expressive forms of civic engagement differ across and within immigrant generation.”

Antwan Jones has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. He is currently on sabbatical completing projects on neighborhood effects on cardiovascular outcomes in Appalachia. He has been contributing to the public discourse on race, place, and health in media outlets such as WalletHub, Democracy Journal, and The Huffington Post. He was recently selected for and appointed to several boards including the DC Policy Center, DC Commission on African American Affairs, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Evidence for Action. His book “Parental Socioeconomic Instability and Child Obesity” is forthcoming, and he also co-authored the article “Geographic and Individual Correlates of Subclinical Atherosclerosis in Asymptomatic Rural Appalachian Population” for the Journal of the Medical Sciences.

Michelle Kelso spent the fall semester working on her manuscript about Roma and collective memory of the Holocaust in Romania as well as teaching as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest. She was also interviewed on several national Romanian news program on Digi TV and Realitatea TV regarding the sociological aspects of the U.S. presidential election. This April she will be speaking at the British Sociological Association on "Reflections on Holocaust Education of the Roma Genocide in Romania." Michelle became a contributor for the Huffington Post and for University World News and recently published a book chapter "Reflection on Holocaust Education of the Roma genocide in Romania" in Reimagining utopias: Theory and method for educational research in post-socialist contexts (Sense Publishing).

Ivy Ken published an article in the 2016 issue of the Yearbook of Women's History (Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis) on Gendered Food Practices from Seed to Waste. The article, written with Benjamín Elizalde, focuses on the neoliberal harms and political possibilities experienced by women in a rural, southern Chilean town who received technical assistance from the state on organic farming techniques and personal development. Dr. Ken also delivered a presentation at the Hawaii Sociological Association in Hilo this February (2018) on her paper title "When Food is Profit: An Actor-Network Translation". Prof. Ken also serves as GW Food Institute Faculty Coordinator.

Hilary Silver joined the GW faculty in January 2017 as Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Public Administration. Her most recent publications include "National Urban Policy in the Age of Obama,” pp. 11-44 in James DeFilippis, ed. Urban Policy in the Time of Obama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and “Youth Exclusion in the Middle East.” The Muslim World 107, 1 (2017): 13-40.

Greg Squires' co-authored book (with Larry Kirsch) Meltdown: The Financial Crisis, Consumer Protection, and the Road Forward tracing the first five years of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in action was published by Praeger, in March 2017. His op eds on the CFPB have appeared in the American Banker, The Hill, and Social Policy. This past April, he was awarded the George Washington University Jackie and Rachel Robinson Society Appreciation Award in recognition and support to the sociological and historical connection between race and sports in America. appeared on a panel at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on January 25th , to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. He is the editor of the recently published book, The Fight for Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences, and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act (Routledge 2018).

Steven Tuch is continuing work on his Dean’s Research Scholar project examining the racial attitudes and intergroup experiences of high school students. A book chapter, “The Color of the Dream: Latinos, African Americans, and the American Dream,” recently appeared in Latino/a American Dream (S.L. Hanson and J.K. White, eds.) published by Texas A&M University Press. His coauthored article with Michelle Kelso, “Exploring the Nexus Between Human Services and Sociology Through Engaged Scholarship,” recently appeared in Zeszyty Pracy Socjalnej (Issues in Social Work). During the 2017-18 academic year he will be a visiting scholar in the Institute of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland working on a study of causal attributions of inequality among citizens in post-communist and capitalist nations.

Ron Weitzer was featured in a debate, in Congressional Quarterly Researcher, on whether pornography has implications for public health. He was quoted by The Christian Science Monitor in the article “Backpage.com shutters 'adult' ads section: Did it do enough to stop child sex trafficking?” In March 2018, Professor Weitzer gave invited talks on the topic "Researching and Comparing Legal Prostitution Systems in Europe" at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Macau. He conducted preliminary research in both cities.

Richard Zamoff has been leading the Jackie Robinson Project's Educational Initiative where he visited schools and appeared on the local cable news show, "People To Be Heard."