Sociology, Criminal Justice, and Women's & Gender Studies News
Faculty News | Student News | Class News
Factory Farm Animals Treated Badly
As students in an "animals and society" course at the University of South Carolina Upstate, juniors Wendy Bevill and Steven Picone were already becoming increasingly aware of the conditions factory farm animals endure.
"It shows you a lot," Picone said of professor Clif Flynn's upper-level sociology class, which in 2001 earned the Humane Society of the United States' Best New Animals & Society Course. "You don't really see how (the animals are) treated before you get them on your plate." Read more...
Women and Crime Students Donate Tuna to Piedmont Care
Students in Dr. Diane Daane's Women and Crime class donated over 150 cans of tuna to Piedmont Care. Piedmont Care is a nonprofit organization providing HIV and AIDS care, prevention and advocacy in Spartanburg, Cherokee, and Union counties of South Carolina. They provide services to HIV+ people and their families and prevention/education services to the community. Piedmont Care maintains a food bank to assist clients in financial crisis. Piedmont Care also offers testing. http://www.piedmontcare.org/
Students in the course learned that the criminal justice system deals with HIV/AIDS on a daily basis. The offender population often engages in risky behaviors and crime victims may be exposed during the crime or may also engage risky behaviors. African-American women account for the majority of new HIV infections and the majority of new AIDS cases among women in the U.S.
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.
DEPARTMENT 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.”