Globalization, migration and the transnationalization of more geosocial spaces and life experiences have generated a rich diversity of research questions and, in some instances, entirely novel areas of investigation. A number of overarching, but pressing, questions inform the research and teaching taking place. These inspire research and teaching that examine both (1) discontinuities and continuities with the past and (2) new social configurations of global/local interactions in societies around the world. Faculty interests range from investigations into contentious debates about the political and economic origins of globalization or the continued viability of nation-states to empirical studies about the impact of migration on domestic societies and on migrants themselves.

This area brings together scholars in medical sociology; aging and the life course; disability in society; sociology of population; mental health; and alcohol, drugs and tobacco. Collectively, we are concerned about the health and well-being of individuals of all ages, with a particular focus on social processes that generate disparities in health and health-related outcomes across the life course.

Our research uses primary and secondary data to examine topics including: care work and grandparenting; early-life influences on later-life outcomes; health and mortality among persons with long-term disability; intergenerational relationships; opioid use and deaths of despair; morbidity and mortality trends; the effects of state and local policies on health; racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in health; sexuality and sexual health; and veteran’s health.

Faculty members in this area draw on a variety of methodological approaches, interdisciplinary literatures and theoretical perspectives to interrogate the relationship between the state and capital, the impacts and implications of social policies, and the punitive as well as productive effects of power throughout society. We pay particular attention to the ways in which race, class, gender and citizenship both shape and are shaped by ongoing political struggle. Faculty members in this cluster are especially concerned with linking macro-analyses of political economy to questions of culture, identity, experience and struggle.

Theory lies at the heart of the sociological imagination and an analysis of how social structures and individual lives are intimately connected. How is history embedded in everyday social relations? What are the links between our own social locations and the forms of sociological knowledge we value or produce?

Faculty with a special interest in social theory focus on critical theories of power, colonialism, the body, hegemony, globalization, immigration, intersectionality, labor, social movements, and nationalism. Drawing on diverse bodies of scholarship including Marxist and Gramscian thought, Bourdieu's work on culture and capital, feminism and critical race theory, and postcolonial thought, faculty engage both sociological and interdisciplinary trajectories of theory.