graduate studies
UCSB Sociology Graduate Program
The University of California, Santa Barbara provides a unique environment for graduate work in Sociology. Situated on a stunning peninsula on the Pacific Ocean, the university offers top-ranked training in sociology with world-renowned professors. The department offers rigorous training in theory and a variety of sociological methodologies. Additionally, sociology graduate students specialize in one of the following research areas: Conversation Analysis; Culture; Global Studies; Feminist Studies; Justice, Law and Inequality; Race, Ethnicity, and Nation; and Social Movements, Revolutions & Social Change. UCSB’s sociology graduate students have gone on to top jobs at other universities as well as into numerous research, policy, and activist professions.
Graduate study in the UCSB sociology department is characterized by several distinctive elements. Students have the opportunity to work closely and collaboratively with world-class faculty who are engaged in cutting edge scholarship in a number of key areas of sociology. The department is especially well known and well regarded in the areas of feminist theory and scholarship, in the sociology of culture, in studies of race and ethnicity, the study of globalization and its effects, the study of social movements, formal organizations, institutional theory, in studies of sexuality, conversation analysis and social networks. Students are given solid training in both methods and theory and encouraged to range broadly across fields and methodologies. Interdisciplinarity is encouraged and actively practiced by both faculty and students. Many of our students take seminars, find research opportunities, and additional mentors in other departments. In fact, the UCSB campus is widely known for breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries. The political relevance of scholarship is widely valued here, and the sociology department has a strong tradition of mixing scholarship with activism and concerns for social justice.
