Sociology Department Fall 2025 news updates
Pamela Zabala Ortiz was a panelist for a discussion about the Black Diaspora in 2025 moderated by Saida Grundy in October. “Am I Black Enough?” was the first installment of the Black Identity Series, a partnership between BU’s Howard Thurman Center and African American and Black Diaspora Studies.
Earlier this Fall, Professor Grundy was featured in the MassLive article “For Mass. professors on Charlie Kirk’s watch list, his free speech legacy rings false.”
Joe Harris recently published an op-ed in The Hill on the public option and why now is the time for Republicans to embrace it: “How Republicans can rescue the party and do something good for Americans”.
Deborah Carr co-authored the article “Childhood and Adulthood Social Relationships and Trajectories of Cognitive Function Among Older Chinese Adults” in the Journal of Aging and Health this month.
Ana Villarreal co-authored “Defending the Innovation District: Violence, Urban Entrepreneurialism, and the Privatization of Public Security in Monterrey, Mexico” in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
Heather Schoenfeld was quoted in the news story “Prison oversight office sets course as advocates hope for ‘tangible’ results.”
PhD alum Jonathan Shaffer recently published an article with colleagues in AI & Society,
“‘We can see a savage’: a case study of the colonial gaze in generative AI algorithms”
Elif Birced has published one of her dissertation chapters in Socio-Economic Review as the article “Empowered by consumers: how content creators use relational labor to resist labor control”. And more recently, she co-authored, with current PhD candidate Thao P. Nguyen and former faculty Ashley Mears, “The Right Amount of Sex: Digital Labor in the Grey Zone of Platform Governance” in the journal Work and Occupations.
Fellow PhD alum and current Center for Innovation in Social Science postdoc Stuti Das was interviewed about her research here: Q&A with Dr. Stuti Das, New CISS Postdoctoral Associate.
Finally, Sociology professor John Stone was honored, two years after his passing, in the journal Nations and Nationalism with a tribute issue engaging with his scholarship. You can read the introduction here: John Stone’s Trajectory From Race Relations to Nationalism.