Program News
PROGRAM NEWS
Read stories and updates for and about current and prospective students and faculty in the Sociology program below.
Publications
The Sociology program publishes a monthly newsletter during the fall and spring semesters. Explore past issues below.
You can also browse recent books published by Sociology faculty and scholars.
Announcements and Updates
More Like This
Presidential Professor Phil Kasinitz Received 2022 ASA Distinguish Scholar Award
Our Professor Phil Kasinitz just won the 2022 Distinguished Career Award in the ASA International Migration session.
Big congratulations!
- Congratulations/Kudos
- Announcement

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Richard D. Alba is ranked #110 among Top Scientists for 2022
We are happy to share that our Distinguished Professor Emeritus Richard Alba, has ranked #110 in the world and #69 nationally among top scientists in the area of Law and Political Science.
The full world ranking published by Research.com.
Congratulations to Professor Richard Alba on this important accomplishment!
- Announcement
- Congratulations/Kudos

Alumna Andréa Becker Published An Op-Ed in New York Times
Men benefit from abortion—why don't cis men talk about their abortion stories and why do we mostly study women?
Read the op-ed "Men Have a Lot to Lose When Roe Falls" in New York Times written by our alumna Andréa Becker, who just began her postdoc journey at University of California San Francisco.
- Congratulations/Kudos
Recent News
Dec 26, 2022
Make 2023 Productive and Fulfilling with These Academic Resolutions
From securing funding to taking time to enjoy the music, the Graduate Center offers support to help you reach your goals in 2023.
Dec 7, 2022
Here are the Grad Center Stories YOU Were Most Interested in This Year
These are the stories that our community read the most in 2022.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- Student News
- Alumni News
Dec 1, 2022
Holiday Books: 9 Illuminating Reads from Graduate Center Faculty and Alumni
These memorable books make great gifts.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- Alumni News
Nov 21, 2022
An Immigration and Race Scholar Who Bucks Conventional Thought
Sociologists reflect on the influence of Professor Emeritus Richard Alba.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
Program Newsletter
Sociological Imagination
Sociological Imagination is the Sociology program's monthly newsletter, primarily published during the fall and spring semesters.
Recent Books
View all Sociology books
The Battle Nearer to Home
The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.
Published July 2022
Stanford University Press

Liberty Road
Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism
A unique insight into desegregation in the suburbs and how racial inequality persists
Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road, Gregory Smithsimon shows us how this happened, and why it matters, unearthing the hidden role that suburbs played in establishing the Black middle-class.
Focusing on Liberty Road, a Black middle-class suburb of Baltimore, Smithsimon tells the remarkable story of how residents broke the color barrier, against all odds, in the face of racial discrimination, tensions with suburban whites and urban Blacks, and economic crises like the mortgage meltdown of 2008. Drawing on interviews, census data, and archival research he shows us the unique strategies that suburban Black residents in Liberty Road employed, creating a blueprint for other Black middle-class suburbs.
Smithsimon re-orients our perspective on race relations in American life to consider the lived experiences and lessons of those who broke the color barrier in unexpected places. Liberty Road shows us that if we want to understand Black America in the twenty-first century, we must look not just to our cities, but to our suburbs as well.
Published April 2022
NYU Press

Gains and Losses
How Protestors Win and Lose
Co-authored by Luke Elliott-Negri (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Isaac Jabola-Carolus (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Marc Kagan (Ph.D. candidate, History), Jessica Mahlbacher (Ph.D. '21, Political Science), Manès Weisskircher , and Anna Zhelnina (Ph.D. '20, Sociology)
Presents cutting edge theory about the consequences of social movements and protest while asking what kind of trade-offs protest movements face in trying to change the world around them.
Many scholars have tried to figure out why some social movements have an impact and others do not. By looking inside movements at their component parts and recurrent strategic interactions, the authors of Gains and Losses show that movements usually produce a variety of effects, including recurring packages of gains and losses. They ask what kinds of trade-offs and dilemmas these packages reflect by looking at six empirical cases from around the world: Seattle's conflict over the $15 an hour minimum wage; the establishment of participatory budgeting in New York City; a democratic insurgency inside New York City's Transport Workers' Union; a communist party's struggle to gain votes and also protect citizen housing in Graz, Austria; the internal movement tensions that led to Hong Kong's umbrella occupation; and Russia's electoral reform movement embodied in Alexei Navalny. They not only examine the diverse players in these cases involved in politics and protest, but also the many strategic arenas in which they maneuver. While each of these movements made some remarkable gains, this book shows how many also suffered losses, especially in the longer run.
Published March 2022
Oxford University Press