Bachelor of Arts in Sociology
The power of sociology is in its ability to disclose a fascinating new perspective on social reality. Academically, the rigorous, well-rounded curriculum prepares our majors for graduate programs in sociology, as well as in areas such as social work and law school. Sociology also provides the knowledge and analytical skills necessary to enter careers in government, nonprofit organizations, public relations, social work, market research, management and many other professions.
Degree Requirements
Choose the year you declare(d) your major as Sociology.
Sociology Course Descriptions with Prerequisites
Sociology Internship Locations
Aplha Kappa Delta
International Sociology Honor Society
NEWS
Sociology Program Awarded Membership in Alpha Kappa Delta
The Sociology Program announces that its charter application for a chapter of Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honor Society, was recently approved. The official name of the USC Upstate chapter is the Mu of South Carolina.
“We are proud of this honor, which allows us to recognize the accomplishments of our top students, and provide them with other benefits of membership in AKD,” says Dr. Clif Flynn, Chair, Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice and Women's Studies.
Since its inception in 1920, the aim of Alpha Kappa Delta has been to stimulate scholarship. To become a member of AKD, a student has to be at least a junior and have accumulated the equivalent of an overall grade point average of 3.0 or a ‘B’ average in sociology, with at least 12 hours of sociology course-work. Student scholarship in Alpha Kappa Delta is recognized in several ways. The Society sponsors student travel to regional meetings, supporting those who want to present their own work and learn from the scholarly presentations of others. The Society sponsors annual student paper contests, presenting awards which include monetary prizes, travel support, and scholarships. In addition, by funding research symposia and honoraria for guest speakers, the Society supports chapter activities which further education. The Society continues to recognize scholarly excellence in sociology by inducting approximately 4,000 lifetime members each year.”
FACULTY NEWS
Dr. Brigitte Neary, associate professor of Sociology, has published an online review of In 1945 They Were Children: Flight and Expulsion in the Life of a Generation by Alena Wagnerova and Julie Winter.
Dr. Neary has also been honored as the 2009 recipient of Menschenrechtspreis der Volksgruppe der Donauschwaben (Human Rights Award of the Ethnic German Danube Suevians). The Award will be conferred December 10 in Stuttgart, Germany. In his letter of recommendation on behalf of Brigitte’s nomination, Dr. Alfred de Zayas of The Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and the 2007 recipient of this award, wrote: “Professor Neary has done ground-breaking work on women’s issues and has demonstrated academic courage in addressing the hitherto neglected history of the expulsion of millions of German civilians from their home at the end of World War II. In so doing she has on both sides of the Atlantic illuminated the sociological, psychological, historical, and legal aspects of this form of ethnic cleansing. …The work of Dr. Neary should contribute to a realization that all forms of ethnic cleansing are fundamentally wrong, and that the inhumanities of the expulsions of innocent Germans [from] 1944-50 should be taught in all high schools and universities – not only in Germany and Austria, but also in the United States and Canada.”
Dr. Calvin Odhiambo, assistant professor of Sociology, has had his workshop presentation, titled “The Risks of Cardiovascular Disease among African Americans who are HIV Positive” accepted for The United States Conference on AIDS, October 29-31, 2009 in San Francisco, CA.
Dr. Lizabeth Zack, assistant professor of Sociology, published a review of American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism, reviewed in the May 2009 issue of Contemporary Sociology.
Dr. Clif Flynn, professor of Sociology, has published a chapter in “Women-Battering, Pet Abuse, and Human-Animal Relationships” in Andrew Linzey (Ed.), The Link between Animal Abuse and Human Violence. Sussex Academic Press, 2009.)
Dr. Laura Jennings, assistant professor of Sociology, has a book chapter coming out in print this fall. “Public Fat: Canadian Provincial Governments and Fat on the Web.” in Esther Rothblum, Sondra Solovay, and Marilyn Wann (Eds.), Fat Studies Reader. New York University Press. (Forthcoming, Nov. 2009).
Dr. Clif Flynn Receives USC Upstate's Annual Award to Faculty for Scholarly and/or Creative Pursuits
At USC Upstate's Spring 2009 Commencement Exercises, 2008-2009 TEC Chair, Dr. Celena E. Kusch delivered the following remarks:
"It gives me great pleasure to honor Professor Clif Flynn with USC Upstate’s Annual Award to Faculty for Scholarly and/or Creative Pursuits. As researchers, scholars, and creative artists, our faculty members are actively engaged in expanding what we know about our world and applying that knowledge to make it a better place in which to live. This award sponsored by Bank of America honors faculty members who have made an impact within their fields of expertise. This year’s award nominees all distinguished themselves with research that attracted national and international attention to USC Upstate. Our nominees have received recognition in Italy, France, Switzerland, Great Britain, and throughout the United States."
"Among this highly-accomplished group of faculty, Dr. Flynn stood out for his important work in highlighting the role animals play in human lives and for changing the way we study sociology to include human-animal interactions. Through his many books, articles, and presentations, Dr. Flynn has been widely recognized as a leader in this field. His research has revealed new insights into animal abuse, animal cruelty, and the relationships between pets and domestic violence. For example, he has found that women may be more reluctant to leave an abusive home because of fear for their pets, but also that pets can help women to survive domestic violence. Because of Dr. Flynn’s work, organizations that support survivors of domestic violence have begun to develop programs to shelter their pets as well."
"His research is also changing the shape of sociology courses. In 2008, Dr. Flynn published Social Creatures: A Human and Animal Studies Reader, one of the first anthologies in the field. Already his book is being used in courses at dozens of colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada, including the University of Chicago, SUNY Buffalo, and the University of Colorado. Last year he was also named a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in Oxford, England. Dr. Flynn also serves as an officer and organizing member of the American Sociological Association's Section on Animals and Society. We are proud to extend this award to Clif Flynn for his notable achievements in sociology."
Dr. Calvin Odhiambo, assistant professor of sociology, has been accepted into the Summer Institute Program to Increase Diversity (SIPID) in Cardiovascular Health Disparities Research. The Institute will be held at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY from July 12-25. More information can be found at http://www.downstate.edu/sipid/, including the introduction and overview of the program.
Dr. Brigitte Neary, associate professor of sociology, was recently appointed to the Board of Directors of the Institute for German American Relations (IGAR) in Pittsburg, Pa. Dr. Neary’s appointment is an acknowledgement of the relevance of her work to the mission of IGAR: “promoting friendship and understanding between the people of the United States and Germany” through education, broadly defined.
Dr. Neary has distinguished herself among her fellow faculty members by becoming the first to publish two books in two languages on two continents.
Frauen und Vertreibung, scheduled for release this month from Stocker/Ares Verlag, Graz, Austria, is a socio-historical research project that contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the wounds of women in both war and peace. This book is an extension of Dr. Neary’s 2002 English-language U.S. publication.
Frauen und Vertreibung provides poignant materials on the suffering of East European German women caught up in the cauldron of flight and forcible expulsion from their homeland in the aftermath of World War II. Neary invites inter-subjective understanding as she captures the trauma and violence unleashed on these women, including mass rapes. Her women’s centered studies, focused on the waning months of World War II through 1950, can be extrapolated to the carnage confronting the women in Chad, the Congo, and Darfur. However, the German case has largely been excluded from the embrace of sisterhood and attacked by historians and feminist scholars.
Neary’s first book was a co-authored collection and analysis of personal narratives of German women from East Central Europe, displaced from their homeland in the aftermath of World War II. Voices of Loss and Courage: German Women Recount Their Expulsion from East Central Europe, 1944-1950, allowed the women to be taped as they recollected their forced departure from home when they were girls, young women or young mothers.
Both of Neary’s parents were among the estimated 14.5 million Germans who were either expelled from their homeland or fled the Russian front -- 2.1 million perished.
“I grew up with the consequences of the displacement, initially experiencing absolute deprivation,” said Neary. “The shadow of the tremendous loss to my parents lingered on and was like a concrete presence in our lives.”
Since her 2002 publication, Neary learned the hard way that her scholarship challenges the Nazi stigma of collective guilt still imposed today on all manner of German. Paradoxically, this stigma of group belonging functions to simultaneously legitimize and nullify the most inhuman treatment of millions of German women. These women, as well as all messengers, who provide them a voice, are targets of “racial discrimination.”
According to Article 1 of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), “the term `racial discrimination’ shall mean any distinction, exclusion or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”
In addition to contributing to the body of scholarship on women and armed conflict, the purpose of Neary’s work has increasingly become to foster “recognition” and establish an “equal footing of human rights” for these women that can be generalized to all manner of German – nothing less.
STUDENT NEWS
Student Honors 2008-2009
C. Wright Mills Award for Outstanding Sociology Major
Stacey Haney, and
Michelle Varner
Alpha Kappa Delta, International Sociology Honor Society Inductees, 2009
Kevin Boyd
Joni Hammond
Amanda McKinney
Vernette Porter
Lauren Smith
Students Graduating with Honors
Sociology – Ashley Harp, cum laude
Sociology – Melissa Revels, magna cum laude
Sociology majors Amanda Knowles and Randi Hunton, two of Dr. Brigitte Neary's (Sociology)students, presented papers at the Carolina Undergraduate Social Science Symposium at the University of South Carolina Aiken, April 23-24, 2009. Knowles’ paper was titled “Germans Guilty until Proven Innocent” and Hunton’s was “The Paradox of Contemporary Rap Music.” Hunton was awarded second place (out of 49 papers presented at the symposium). Her award came with a certificate and a $25 check. In addition to mentoring her students and supervising their research, Neary also served as chair of a paper session on “Global Issues.”
University of South Carolina Upstate senior Stacey Haney has been invited to present her research at the annual Popular & American Culture Associations in the South conference in Louisville, Ky. on October 9 and 10, 2008.
Her paper titled “Tuning In or Tuning Out? Masculinity in Popular American Television,” explores alternative forms of masculinity as seen in several popular TV shows, including NBC’s Will & Grace, HBO’s Oz, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila on MTV, and Showtime’s The L Word, and is part of a panel discussion on gender topics.
Defined by what it is not, alternative masculinity refers to the portrayal of the masculine by anyone other than white, middle class, heterosexual males. Haney, a sociology major and women’s studies minor, says that these shows in varying ways present non-mainstream forms of masculinity through gay, minority and female characters.
Will & Grace was the first network TV series to showcase one or more homosexuals as principal characters. Oz, a show about male prisoners in a maximum-security prison, explores the variety of relationships that develop between the men. A Shot At Love, a bisexual-themed reality dating show, follows the men and women who compete for the affections of internet sensation Tila Tequila. Lesbian drama, The L Word, examines the masculine roles that the all-female cast explores.
In their conferences and journals, the Popular & American Culture Associations examine “the customs, artifacts, events, myths, language, and the like that are shared by a significant portion of a culture or sub-culture” according to the associations’ Web site www.pcasacas.org. Presenters at the upcoming conference will address a range of pop culture issues, including television, music, animation, comics, sport culture, horror, gender and politics, detective fiction, fairy tales, the Gothic, literature, Star Trek, and more.
OUR ALUMNI
.JPG "April Dove")
April Dove graduated in May 2005 from USC Upstate with a B.A. in Sociology. She began graduate school in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, Columbia in the fall of 2005. She received her M.A. in Sociology from USC in 2009. Her thesis centers on the framing techniques utilized by two anti-illegal immigration social movement groups operating along the U.S.-Mexican Border. April has a forthcoming publication titled “Framing Illegal Immigration at the U.S.-Mexican Border: Anti-Illegal Immigration Groups and the Importance of Place in Framing” which will appear in Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, Volume 30 in the fall of 2009. She is currently a PhD Candidate and anticipates graduating in May 2011. Her areas of interest include social movements, social control, collective and cultural memory and museum creation. April is also researching the emergence of civil rights museums during the 1990s in the American south with Dr. Lizabeth Zack. Dr. Zack and April have been involved in museum research for several years and have presented papers together at regional and national sociological conferences. They have a co-authored paper currently under review for publication.
Class News
Age Related Impairments: A Simulation Exercise
Undergraduates often have difficulty understanding what the normal sensory losses and changes in functional status mean to older adults. To overcome this experiential problem, a classroom assignment, the aging simulation exercise, was developed by Dr. Calvin Odhiambo for his Sociology of Aging class to engage students as active participants in their learning. Students are obliged to "experience" first-hand some of the many aches and pains as well as sensory losses commonly associated with the aging process. The aging simulation exercise individualizes the effects of physiological aging by forcing students to experience functional losses. By doing so, it brings home the meaning of functional impairments to healthy, young undergraduate students in a much more effective way than even the best written chapter in a text or the most brilliant lecture could hope to achieve. Many more photos of this class are on the University's flickr site.
Sociology in the News
How will you spend the 21st Century?
An article from Footnotes
Doing the math to Find the Good Jobs
An article from the Career Journal