Department of Sociology
Department of Sociology McGill University
User Tools (skip):
Global navigation (skip):
Sociology
Up-coming Events
CAREER DAY 2009
“Planning For Your Future”
Wondering What You Can Do With a Degree in Sociology?
- What kinds of career prospects do you have with a background in sociology?
- What can you do during your time at McGill to develop “real world” job skills?
- What resources does McGill have to assist you with finding a job after graduation?
In this half-day event, hear from and network with McGill sociology alumni, students and staff to find out the answer to these questions and more. For a complete schedule of events click here: Career Day Program [.pdf]
When: Friday, October 2, 2009 (10:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.)
Where: LEA 232
Lunch provided
NO SIGN-UP REQUIRED
Recent Events
The Sociology Department welcomes new and returning graduate students alike to the academic year 2009-2010.
Graduate students (from left to right) Erin Denton, Sara Hall, Nicole Mardis, Christine Proulx, Andrew Dawson, Meagen Miller, Elena Martinez, Sean Clouston, and Nicole Denier prepare to dig into the feast.
Ph.D. students Sara Hall and Hadi Karsoho take the opportunity to have a tête à tête with our chair, Morton Weinfeld.
An enthusiastic start to the new year with a group of faculty and graduate students: (left to right) Shelley Clark, Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, Karen Rauh, Sean Clouston and Marcos Ancelovici.
Recent Books
Fallon, Kathleen Democracy and the Rise of Women's Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
Despite a late and fitful start, democracy in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe has recently shown promising growth. Kathleen M. Fallon discusses the role of women and women's advocacy groups in furthering the democratic transformation of formerly autocratic states. Using Ghana as a case study, Fallon examines the specific processes women are using to bring about political change. She assesses information gathered from interviews and surveys conducted in Ghana and assays the existing literature to provide a focused look at how women have become involved in the democratization of sub-Saharan nations. The narrative traces the history of democratic institutions in the region—from the imposition of male-dominated mechanisms by western states to latter-day reforms that reflect the active resurgence of women’s political power within many African cultures—to show how women have made significant recent political gains in Ghana and other emerging democracies. Fallon attributes these advances to a combination of forces, including the decline of the authoritarian state and its attendant state-run women's organizations, newly formed constitutions, and newfound access to good-governance funding. She draws the study into the larger debate over gendered networks and democratic reform by exploring how gender roles affect and are affected by the state in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. In demonstrating how women’s activism is evolving with and shaping democratization across the region, Democracy and the Rise of Women’s Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa reveals how women’s social movements are challenging the barriers created by colonization and dictatorships in Africa and beyond.
Grégoire Mallard, Post-Doctoral Fellow at McGill, [with Catherine Paradeise and Ashveen Peerbaye] Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science
This provides detailed case studies on how sovereignty has been constructed, reaffirmed, and transformed in the Twentieth century by the construction of scientific disciplines, knowledge practices, and research objects. Interrogating the relationship of the sovereign power of the nation state to the scientist's expert knowledge as a legitimating--and sometimes challenging--force in contemporary society, this book provides a staggering range of case studies in its exploration of how different types of science have transformed our understanding of national sovereignty in the last century. From biochemical sciences in Russia, to nuclear science in the US and Europe, from economics in South Asia, to climatology in South America, each chapter demonstrates the role that scientists play in the creation of nation-states and international organizations. With an array of experts and scholars, the essays in Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science offer a complete redefinition of the modern concept of sovereignty and an illuminating reassessment of the role of science in political life.
One of the most important issues in comparative politics is the relationship between the state and society and the implications of different relationships for long-term social and economic development. Exploring the contribution states can make to overcoming collective action problems and creating collective goods favourable to social, economic, and political development, the contributors to this significant volume examine how state-society relations as well as features of state structure shape the conditions under which states seek to advance development and the conditions that make success more or less likely. Particular focus is given to bureaucratic oversight, market functioning, and the assertion of democratic demands discipline state actions and contribute to state effectiveness. These propositions and the social mechanisms underlying them are examined in comparative historical and cross-national statistical analyses. The conclusion will also evaluate the results for current policy concerns.
Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe.
Recent Awards
Tania Jenkins, M.A. student in Sociology, received the Arts Graduate Student Teaching Award for her outstanding teaching assistence in SOCI 225 and SOCI 250. To learn more about this award visit http://www.mcgill.ca/arts/.
Marcos Ancelovici, who joined our faculty in 2007 after completing his Ph.D. at MIT, has been awarded the Georges Lavau Dissertation Award of the American Political Science Association for the best English-language dissertation on French politics defended between 2005 and 2007. Entitled “Between Adaptation and Resistance: Labor Responses to Globalization in France,” Ancelovici’s dissertation argues that contemporary labor responses to globalization are shaped by organizational and path-dependent processes rather than economic factors.
Professor John Hall has been awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities grant for the academic year 2007-08 in order to complete a biography of Ernest Gellner (1925-1995). He came to know Gellner quite well in the last years of his life, not least because he taught quite often at the Central European University in Prague--where Gellner ended his career, as the Director of a Centre for the Study of Nationalism. One element of the biography derives from that experience, namely a sustained sense of the tricultural world of Germans, Czechs and Jews in which Gellner grew up together, the loss of which placed questions of identity thereafter at the center of his thought. But the biography has two purposes beyond that of the reconstruction of formative influences. One is to expound his system of thought--for there is indeed system lurking behind Gellner's varied reputations as philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist, with expertise in development, nationalism, rationality and Islam. The second is to provide critical assessment of his thought. Gellner is as great a theorist of modernity as Foucault or Taylor. Did he get it right? What would an improved sociology of modernity look like?
Gregoire Mallard, a Richard Tomlinson post-doctoral fellow in the department, is a co-winner of the best student essay award from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies http://cns.miis.edu/cns/media/pr080701_mcelvany_contest.pdf. His paper, “Can the Euratom Treaty Inspire the Middle East? The Political Promises of Regional Nuclear Communities,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Nonproliferation Review. Dr. Mallard came to McGill after finishing his PhD at Princeton University and will begin his appointment as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University next year.
Two undergraduates in Sociology won Internship Awards this year. Sarah Golightley, U3, won the Dean of Arts Development Fund Internship Award for her internship at the St-James Drop-In Centre and Aviva Stahl, U2, won the Arts Undergraduate Improvement Fund Internship Award, which will support her internship at the Social Justice Committee. To learn more about these exciting internship award opportunities as well as this years recipients go to http://www.mcgill.ca/arts-internships/awards/recipients/
