Welcome to a new year at UBC Sociology



Dear students and other members of the UBC Sociology community,

Welcome to UBC Sociology! These are strange times indeed. We are all facing new challenges and here you are returning (or starting) your journey at UBC in the Department of Sociology. We are delighted to have you here but recognize this must all feel a bit surreal. You will almost definitely be missing many of the interactions and events that are part of the typical university calendar. We miss having students to interact with in person and to feel the bustle in ANSO, see students biking or skateboarding all across campus, and huddled over notes before entering a class.

And yet these are also exciting times for Sociology. Nothing is closer to the root of our discipline than trying to understand social change and crises and there is no doubt we are witnessing change all around. The pandemic is fostering new norms of interaction, novels forms of isolation, and rejuggling our daily routines in ways we could never have anticipated. These changes are impacting various segments of society in often very different ways – some of these are predictable and some are more surprising. These changes position Sociology – more broadly the sociological imagination – as an unparalleled way to observe and understand forces that tear and reshape the social fabric.

“The Department of Sociology both supports and encourages efforts by our faculty to participate and to help develop greater awareness within our student population of continued violence - often state-sanctioned - that affects Black, Indigenous and racialized people in Canada, as well as the U.S.”
Department Head

Alongside all of these changes, our department is doing amazing things and I hope you use this opportunity to explore what is taking place inside our department – by faculty and students. In this coming year, we have three new faculty members joining us:(Professor Tony Silva, Professor Michela Musto, and Professor Kimberly Huyser). Some of you will get to take classes with them and we are delighted to have these great scholars help to extend our breadth and increase our research and teaching in areas as diverse as sociology of Indigenous populations, sociology of health, and gender and sexuality.

We are also expecting to interview candidates for three additional positions this year. One of these is in the sociology of race and ethnicity. We are particularly focused on this area as racial and ethnic inequality continues to tear apart communities and individual lives. While Sociology as a discipline has focused considerable attention on the study of racism and discrimination over the course of the 20th Century and beyond, Black, indigenous and other racialized groups within society continue to suffer in society as a whole as well as within the academic world.

The horrific evidence of police brutality and racism in the US as well as in Canada are manifestations of long term problems and make clear how much further we have to go as a society. The recently announced Scholar Strike September 9-10, represents an effort to engage in a labour action/teach-in/social justice advocacy that is aligned with and support calls for racial justice and an end to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous police violence.

This is an important moment. The Department of Sociology both supports and encourages efforts by our faculty to participate and to help develop greater awareness within our student population of continued violence – often state-sanctioned – that affects Black, Indigenous and racialized people in Canada, as well as the U.S. We encourage our students to engage – whether through their studies, activism both within and outside of campus, and in their own communities – in activities and learning opportunities associated with the scholars strike.

I wish you all an exciting year filled with inspirational ideas and academic motivation as well as a safe and supportive period to get through this pandemic.

Head of Department Guy Stecklov