Department of Sociology

John Skrentny, a professor in the Sociology Department, was appointed as Director of the Division of Social Sciences‘ Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research. The office of the dean of the division of social sciences stated:

We are grateful to fellow sociologist Lane Kenworthy for stewarding the center for the past two years. We are excited about the future of the Yankelovich Center at UC San Diego and look forward to building new partnerships in the region and beyond.

The Yankelovich Center at UC San Diego – founded in 2012 by Daniel Yankelovich, who in 2016 also established a planned gift to sustain the center into perpetuity – is dedicated to developing practical solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems.

John’s plans for the Yankelovich Center include taking the findings of the commission out to the public and, in partnership with Public Agenda, a nonpartisan non-profit organization in New York City, testing which solutions have the most promise in terms of political feasibility and public support. In addition to the center’s existing executive board, John is also putting together a regional advisory board of community stakeholders. Cities and rural regions, he says, are the new laboratories of democracy – and we can best make national progress by beginning on a regional level and then scaling up best practices and solutions.

To learn more about the center and to connect: http://yankelovichcenter.ucsd.edu/

Professor of Sociology and co-director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies David FitzGerald was featured in a San Diego Union-Tribune article titled “‘You’re just there, trapped’: Why one Mexican woman decided to ‘self-deport,’ long before Trump.” In the article, David writes:

These policies are designed to increase anxiety, they’re designed to create fear in immigrant communities. The government knows they’ll never be able to go out and deport the unauthorized population – and one of their stated hopes is that people will self-deport.

Professor Gershon Shafir of the UCSD department of Sociology was quoted in a the San Francisco Chronicle article titles “For Bay Area student, hunger strike in Israeli prison is personal.” The article discusses a hunger strike in an Israeli prison and features Gershon Shafir in which he says:

Gershon Shafir of the UCSD Sociology department wrote in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. In the article titled “Israel’s ‘temporary’ occupation has lasted 50 years. A new book explains why,” Gershon discusses the subject of his new book, “A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict.” He writes:

In my new book, I describe how the “Shamgar Doctrine” — which I name after Meir Shamgar, the military’s general advocate during the 1967 war and the president of the Israeli Supreme Court in the 1980s — justifies and legalizes this apparent contradiction.

Amy Binder, professor at UCSD Sociology, shared her expertise with The Chronicle of Higher Education on an article titles “It’s Been a Messy Semester for Free Speech on Campus. What’s Next?” The article discusses controversial speakers invited to speak at universities across the country. Binder shared that the best practice to avoid blowups would be for universities to hold events despite the security costs.

“I would also advise faculty, students, and those in the community to ignore the events and not even show up to protest, quite frankly.”

Read the full article here.

David FitzGerald, professor of sociology at UCSD spoke with the French publication Liberation about his book “Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas.” Read the full article online here.