The Sociology Department at California State University Fullerton is committed to providing our students with the skills and methods to study social behavior from a sociological perspective. Our mission is to develop among our students a critical, ethical, and inclusive understanding of complex social phenomena. Our students examine and reflect upon social phenomena, including intersecting structures and processes that reproduce social inequalities, causes and consequences of collective and political action, and other social processes in various institutional contexts. Our faculty conducts academic research on a wide variety of areas of expertise, including race and ethnic relations, education, demography, gender and sexualities, crime and deviance, health and illness, economic sociology, political sociology, religion, and migration and globalization. We contribute to the public good by producing knowledge, engaging public policy, and by our commitment to social and scientific responsibility in the communities we study. The Department offers rigorous and quality undergraduate and graduate academic programs in sociology that provide a supportive student-centered learning environment and promote civic engagement in the local and global communities.
We achieve our mission by:
- Engaging in quality social research and other scholarly activities that advance knowledge in the sociological discipline and can be applied to our teaching activities.
- Providing our students with knowledge and understanding of key sociological concepts, findings, and theoretical approaches so that they can apply them critically and reflect on complex social issues and contexts, including their own.
- Fostering critical thinking and analytical abilities among our students to identify, for example, the structure of an argument, examine the implicit assumptions of an institutional practice or media message, and more generally, meet the challenges of a rapidly changing and uncertain world.
- Creating a learning environment where students acquire and practice qualitative and quantitative research design and methods, academic writing skills, and interpersonal communication skills to be professionally competitive in a multicultural and increasingly transnational job market.
- Offering our students opportunities to engage in experiential, cultural diversity learning, and other high-impact educational practices, including student-faculty research collaborations, independent research, graduate assistantships, peer tutoring, community-based applied research, service learning, internships, and study abroad programs.
- Promoting civic engagement and good democratic citizenship among our students, including respecting the rights, worth, and dignity of all people, training in the standards of ethical research, professional fairness, and social and scientific responsibility.
