Graduate Sociology at SUNY Albany

Area of Specialization: Gender Studies

The Graduate Program in the Department of Sociology has major strengths in gender studies. Several faculty members focus the majority of their research on issues of gender and have strong ties with the Women's Studies Department. Many others pursue research that includes gender issues. Students may take any of the following relevant courses and may choose to focus on gender for one of their specialization examinations at the doctoral level or for a master's thesis or dissertation topic.

Gender Courses in the Sociology Department

• Gender Inequality
• Global Gender Issues
• Race, Gender, and Work
• Gender and Leadership
• Gender, Crime and Justice

Sociology courses in related areas

• Children and Public Policy
• Families
• Family and Household Demography
• Queer Theory
• Social Psychology
• Sociology of Work
• Social Interaction Processes
• Stratification

Students may register for Soc 606 Coteaching Internship and coteach a course on gender at the undergraduate level.

Women's Studies Department

The Women's Studies program began in 1971, and in 1989 it became a department. It encompasses faculty with core appointments, joint appointments, and affiliated faculty, representing 20 different departments across the campus. It offers a major, a minor, a MA in Women’s Studies, a graduate certificate in Women and Public Policy (see below), and is developing joint graduate endeavors with disciplinary departments. The Women's Studies program offers a wide range of courses that allow students to reexamine traditional disciplines from a feminist perspective and to develop new trans-disciplinary approaches to the study of women. Many students in Sociology with interests in Gender pursue the Women’s Studies MA along with their PhD in Sociology, under cooperative agreements between the two departments.

Certificate Program on Women and Public Policy

The graduate Certificate Program on Women and Public Policy is designed both for students currently enrolled in public policy-related graduate programs, who may pursue this certificate in conjunction with an MA, MS, or PhD program at Albany, or for members of the community who wish to upgrade their skills and enroll in a self-standing program. It prepares participants to influence public policy affecting women through advocacy, research, elective office, community organization, administration, and policy analysis. The requirements for this multi-disciplinary 18 credit minimum program include two core seminars, Feminist Thought and Public Policy and Women and Public Policy; one course on policy issues from one of the participating departments; one course on skills affecting the public policy process; one policy reasoning course; and the Colloquium in Public Affairs and Policy.

Institute for Research on Women

The Institute for Research on Women (IROW) was founded in 1987 to bring together specialists from a wide variety of disciplines to engage in individual or collaborative research on women. IROW faculty associates come from 24 departments across the campus and represent several interdisciplinary interest areas: international and cross-cultural studies of women; racial ethnic women in the U.S.; women, work and organizations; women, literature and art; women and science; and family and employment policy.

IROW has sponsored workshops on obtaining funding for research and has held many conferences, including "Women and Development" (1989), "Integrating Class, Race, and Gender into the Curriculum and Research" (1991), and "Women in the Global Economy" (1994); and had a project on “Gender Studies in Global Perspective,” all with the support of grants from the Ford Foundation and other agencies.

Graduate Students

A number of graduate students are involved in research on gender and many have completed dissertations in this area. Topics include:

• Emotion Work in Women’s Abortion Experiences
• The Making of Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Gendered Processes of Korean Small Business Ownership
• Globalization and Gender: Exploring the Effects of Welfare Reform in Puerto Rico
• Professional Commitments and Political Identities: Challenges for Feminist Academic Sociologists
• When Women Need Care: How Breast Cancer “Survivors” Cope with Being Care-Receivers
• Determinants of Son Preference in India and Health Outcomes for Children
• Straight Trouble: Gendered and Racial Heterosexuality in the Context of Gay and LesbianVisibility
• The “Condom Lady” Speaks: Female Sexuality Discourses and HIV Prevention in Community-Based Organizations
• Work flexibility, work culture, and gender
• The Challenges and Rewards of Sisterhood: An Exploration of Women’s Experiences in Black Sororities.
  ? Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Black Women, A Century in the Bottom Class, 1860-1960
• Gendered International Marriage Migration under Globalization: Filipina Wives in South Korean Rural Communities
• Exploring a Culture of Intimacy: Individualism and solidarity in heterosexual relationships
• Women in a Man's World: The Experiences of Women in Landscaping
  
  

Faculty in Gender

Christine E. Bose
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University

Professor Bose's interests are in US and global gender studies, stratification and labor market issues, international development and migration, and race/ethnicity differences among women. She has published in the areas of occupational prestige, women’s employment as it varies by ethnicity, the social impact of household technology, gender and development in Latin America, women’s global carework, and women's work at the turn of the century. She has served as Chair of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association, Editor of Gender & Society, Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society, Chair of the ASA Committee on Publications, and President of Sociologists for Women in Society. On campus, Professor Bose was the founding Director of our Institute for Research on Women and has been Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies.

Angie Chung
Ph.D. UCLA

Professor Chung’s research interests include urban sociology, international migration, race/ ethnicity, gender/ family, Asian American studies, and qualitative sociology. Her most recent study explores how adult second-generation Korean and Chinese American sons and daughters negotiate their childhood experiences in an immigrant family and how this shapes their long-term decisions on family, career, and culture in gendered ways. She is also writing on the role of extended family/ kinship networks in shaping the processes of racial/ ethnic identity formation among foreign-born and native-born South Asian American sons and daughters in NY. She is affiliated with Women's Studies.

Donald J. Hernandez
Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley

Professor Hernandez’s research interests include life course processes, children and the family, social and economic stratification, immigration, race and ethnicity. His book America’s Children: Resources from Family, Government and the Economy focused on how the life course experience of children has been transformed by historical changes in the parental life course, with special attention to race and ethnicity. Recent work assesses historical change and contemporary differences in the lives of children in immigrant and native-born families, with particular emphasis on economic deprivation using an improved poverty measure and sources of difference in preschool enrollment.

Kecia Johnson
Ph.D. North Carolina State

Professor Johnson’s research examines how race and gender inequality influence crime and delinquency. Her first area involves the collateral consequences of incarceration for individuals and communities, with a current project focusing on the impact of incarceration on employment and earnings trajectories of African American, Latino and white men. A second area explores the relationship between schools and delinquency, by considering the extent to which stratification and disciplinary practices within schools and individual level characteristics affect delinquency, across race and gender. She teaches courses on the Sociology of Gender; Gender, Crime and Justice; Sociology of Deviant Behavior; and Race/Ethnicity and Crime.

Karyn Loscocco
Ph.D. Indiana University

Professor Loscocco's research focuses on gender, work and family. Past publications have dealt with the work attitudes of blue-collar women and men, and the impact of work and family on job attitudes and emotional well-being. Current studies include gender patterns among the self-employed in determinants and definitions of success, the work-family interface, and social networks. She also has a project on gender and the cultural imagery of love in marriage. Professor Loscocco is affiliated with the Women’s Studies Department and active in SWS and the Sex and Gender section of ASA.

Gwen Moore
Ph.D. New York University

Professor Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies. Her research focuses on comparative elite studies, analyses of gender and authority, and investigations of personal, organizational and national network structures. Two recent books are Gendering Elites: Economic and Political Leadership in 27 Industrialized Societies and Women and Men in Political and Business Elites: A Comparative Study (coordinator and editor).

Steven Seidman
Ph.D. University of Virginia

Steve Seidman works in the areas of theory, sexuality, and the study of empire and nation. He draws considerably from critical gender studies in his general approach to sociology and social analysis. Recently, queer gender scholars such as Butler and Halberstam have informed his thinking about ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and sexual/gender identity.

Glenna Spitze
Ph.D. University of Illinois

Professor Spitze's research interests include gender and families, intergenerational relations, and paid and unpaid labor. She is co-author of Family Ties: Enduring Relations between Parents and Their Grown Children (winner of the Goode Distinguished Book Award). Her current work focuses on family divisions of paid and unpaid labor, sibling relations, relationships between older parents and adult children, and the role of personal networks in older adults’ health outcomes. She holds a joint appointment in the Women’s Studies Department and currently serves as its Graduate Director.

Barbara Sutton
Ph.D. University of Oregon

Professor Sutton’s research interests include the intersections of systems of social inequality (gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality), women’s and global justice movements, human rights and state violence, body politics, globalization, and feminist theory and research. She is particularly interested in Latin America, and more specifically in Argentina. She is currently conducting a comparative study on perceptions of state violence.

Katherine Trent
Ph.D. University of Texas

Professor Trent's research interests are in social demography and families. Her research addresses family attitudes, abortion, fertility, marriage, divorce, spousal and sibling relations, and other family and reproductive issues in the United States as well as other countries.

David G. Wagner
Ph.D. Stanford University

Professor Wagner is interested primarily in the explanation of gender inequalities in work groups and other situations in which tasks are performed, particularly as these inequalities are reflected in and affected by differences in status, power, or rewards in the group. His work also focuses on the implications of these status, power and reward differences for our ability to reduce gender inequalities. Professor Wagner is the recipient of both the University’s and the SUNY Chancellor’s 2004 Excellence in Teaching Awards.

-From 2007 brochure