ECU Department of Sociology

Home
United States
Greenville, NC
ECU Department of Sociology

Directions Website Contact the university

East Carolina University Department of Sociology is located in Brewster A-416.

10/29/2026

Tonight, Dr. Myers talked about domestic violence and intimate partner violence to ECU’s chapter of Phi Sigma Pi, a service fraternity on campus. For Domestic Violence Awareness month, they created supply packs for people being supported at the Center for Family Violence Prevention (C4VP). Packs included food items, baby supplies, and necessary hygiene items for being sheltered. A great night overall!

10/28/2026

Good evening! Looking for something great to read? Something that will stick with you for years to come? As Dr. Mamadi Corra says, Make a pick. Here are his top 7.

He says, “You will see that they all reflect my interest in power and status dynamics, especially in U.S. society, and my interest in categorical inequalities.”
M
1. Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World
Book by Cecilia L. Ridgeway
2. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild
3. The classic 1963 book Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective Peter L. Berger
4. The Power Elite
The 1956 sociological book by C. Wright Mills
5. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Book by Robert D. Putnam
6. Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 2000 (Centennial edition, with an Introduction by historian David Levering Lewis). The Souls of Black Folk: Centennial Edition. New York: Random House Publishing Group.
7. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2017. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

10/20/2026

This week’s TuesData looks at family resources and financial help in young adulthood.

The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) is a long-running study that has followed a cohort of children born in large U.S. cities into young adulthood. At age 22, young adults were asked whether parents or other relatives had recently helped them financially in several areas, such as rent payments, tuition, or car payments. This figure focuses on help with expenses or bills like cell phone bills, groceries, or insurance.

The figure shows the bivariate association between primary caregiver household income and whether young adults received help with expenses and bills. We divided caregiver income into “quintiles,” or 5 groups ranging from lowest to highest income. The predicted percentage receiving assistance rose from 37% among those in the lowest income quintile to 62% among those in the highest income quintile.

Family ties can provide an important safety net in young adulthood, but families differ substantially in the resources they are able to provide. How might unequal access to family financial help shape young adults’ economic security and opportunities as they transition into adulthood?

Visualization by ECU Sociology. Source: Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, Year 22.

10/20/2026

Happy Monday! Today we’re sharing Jermaine McNair’s must-read books. He describes his top 5 like this:
1) Capital, by Karl Marx literally changed my life & jump started my sociological imagination before I knew what Sociology was.
2) The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas - a detailed & personal account of slavery, systems of oppression, and the path to freedom
3) The City, by Park & Burgess (for urban socioligists)
4) Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky (for community organizers like me).
5)***Very Very Special mention***** The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. Everyone should know this story! It’s a short story and fictional but gave me one of the most important lessons about how we all seek validation from our society - even at the highest levels.
What are YOU reading!!??

10/15/2026

We asked Dr. Kirk Miller to share some of his favorite books that shaped him as a criminologist. So many! All iconic. Here are the cream of the crop: Here are several books (lucky 13):

Su***de (Durkheim)

Gender and Power (Connell)

Masculinities and Crime (Messerschmidt)

Discipline and Punish (Foucault) and The Panopticon Writings (Jeremy Bentham)

Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force (Jerome Skolnick and James Fyfe)

The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)

Stigma (Erving Goffman)

Mail and Telephone Surveys: The Total Design Method (Don Dillman)

Crime and Everyday Life (Marcus Felson)

American Apartheid (Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton)

And finally— icon of icons— Tea Room Trade (Laud Humphreys)
Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations (Hubert Blalock)

10/13/2026

This week’s TuesData looks at school start times and teen sleep.

The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study has followed a cohort of children born in large U.S. cities for over 25 years. At age 15, a subset of teens in the study wore wrist actigraphs, devices that use movement to estimate sleep timing and duration. The figure uses the actigraph data to compare sleep timing on school days among 15-year-olds whose schools started before 8:30 AM with those whose schools started at 8:30 AM or later.

Bedtimes were similar across the two groups, but wake times differed much more. Teens with later school start times tended to wake up about an hour later, around 7 AM instead of 6 AM.

The pattern highlights how sleep is shaped not only by individual habits, but also by the schedules and institutions that organize daily life. How might differences in sleep timing shape adolescents’ health, school performance, routines, or overall well-being?

Visualization by ECU Sociology. Source: Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, Year 15.

10/13/2026

Today, we are inspired by Dr. Melinda Kane’s must-read books. Have you read any of these? What are YOU reading! Here’s why she loves these books:

The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochshild

Hochshild’s concept of emotion work resonated deeply with me. She showed how employees are expected to use emotions & emotion displays as part of their work. Just visit Starbucks, as an employee verbally greets you in an upbeat voice and a smile; that is emotion work!

Families on the Fault Line: America’s Working Class Speaks about the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity by Lillian B Rubin

I loved teaching this book in Race, Gender, & Class! Using interviews with Asian, Black, Latino, & White working class families, Rubin shows their economic struggles, the tensions between wives and husbands over new gender expectations, and views on race and immigration. Older interviews, but the issues are still relevant today.

Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment by Muzafer Sherif et al.

This book blew my mind in graduate school. Twelve year old boys were brought to a summer camp where researchers manipulated the setting to document the formation of in-groups and out-groups. See how conflict and cooperation are generated!

Political Institutions and Le***an and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada by Miriam Smith

Great for politic geeks who want to get into the nuts and bolts of how the US and Canada political systems differ. Smith shows how the stable, political differences between the two countries can explain why Canada adopted LGBTQ+ rights before the U.S.

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.

A book of fiction assigned in my undergraduate Philosophy of Women course. (The class would be Feminist Philosophy today.) It was the first time I considered what the world might look like without a gender binary. A book I’ve read over and over.

10/08/2026

We asked Dr. Cindy Anderson what her must-read books are. She started with sociological theory books that have influenced her over her career:

The Everyday world as problematic - Dorothy Smith.

Black Feminist Thought - Patricia Hill Collins

Division of Labor - Emile Durkheim. She said that this book offers a very clear explanation of what holds society together at different points in time.

And of course, Sociological Imagination - C. Wright Mills. She said this book “Made me want to carry around a notebook and right down connections between personal troubles and societal issues.”

Dr. Anderson included some more contemporary books, like the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. She said, “This is the most gripping book I’ve read in the last decade. Kingsolver does a beautiful job of linking individual experiences with structural constraints. There’s a direct connection to many sociological concepts - reproduction of inequality, stigma, labeling, alienation, environmental degradation, and economic disinvestment.”

The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World - Allison Pugh - sociological research on the labor people do for each other and how important that is for belonging.

And she included a book on her wish list: “I haven’t started, but I’m excited to read: End Time Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World - Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor.

What are YOU reading?

10/07/2026

As lifelong students of sociology, we are lucky to have so many fascinating and impactful books that have been published over the decades. All of us have our favorite “must-read” books that we find ourselves recommending over and over— to students, friends, family, and even strangers in line at the coffee shop! What are YOU reading??

We asked Sociology’s Dr. Campbell which books he recommends. Here are his top 5: Ain’t No Makin’ It by Jay MacLeod- I read this as part of an intro to sociology course as a first-year undergrad. It was this book that first got me interested in sociology.

-Heatwave by Eric Klinenberg - I read this early in grad school, and its core argument, that
the consequences of a “natural” disaster are shaped by social vulnerability and community context, helped shape my interest in social support networks and social isolation.

-Someone to Talk to by Mario Small - A very accessible introduction to thinking about social networks, social support, and the ways people use social relationships when they need help.

-Evicted by Matthew Desmond - Combines a readable narrative on a tough topic with compelling findings about how housing insecurity can deepen poverty, strain social relationships and support networks, and the economic realities of low-income housing.

-The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan - not a sociology book, but one of my favorite non-fiction books. It touches on topics relevant to sociology and tells the story of the Dust Bowl in a way that brings together environmental change, economic hardship, migration, and public policy.

Address

1001 E 5th Street, Brewster Bldg
Greenville, NC
27858

Website

http://sociology.ecu.edu/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when ECU Department of Sociology posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.