William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fifty people, the first president of the association would be Lester Frank Ward. Today, most of its members work in academia, while around 20 percent of them work in government, business, or non-profit organizations.
Alpha Kappa Delta (ΑΚΔ) is a non-secret, democratic organization founded in 1920 by Dr. Emory S. Bogardus. It is an international honor society of sociology, and has over 80,000 members and more than 490 chapters established around the world.
Public sociology is a subfield of the wider sociological discipline that emphasizes expanding the disciplinary boundaries of sociology in order to engage with non-academic audiences. It is perhaps best understood as a style of sociology rather than a particular method, theory, or set of political values. Since the twenty-first century, the term has been widely associated with University of California, Berkeley sociologist Michael Burawoy, who delivered an impassioned call for a disciplinary embrace of public sociology in his 2004 American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address. In his address, Burawoy contrasts public sociology with what he terms "professional sociology", a form of sociology that is concerned primarily with addressing other academic sociologists.
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
Cora Alice Du Bois was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally. She was Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College from 1954. After retirement from Radcliffe, she was Professor-at-large at Cornell University (1971–1976) and for one term at the University of California, San Diego (1976).
Elijah Anderson is an American sociologist. He is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project. Anderson is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists. Anderson is known most notably for his book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999).
John Wilfred Meyer is a sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Meyer has contributed fundamental ideas to the field of sociology, especially in the areas of education, organizations, and global and transnational sociology. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory. In 2015, he became the recipient of American Sociological Association's highest honor - W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award.
The sociology of race and ethnic relations is the study of social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of systemic racism, like residential segregation and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups.
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Joan Elise Robinson Acker was an American sociologist, researcher, writer and educator. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1967. Acker is considered one of the leading analysts regarding gender and class within the second wave of feminism.
William A. Darity Jr. is an American economist and social sciences researcher. Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought, but most of his research is devoted to group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. His 2005 paper in the Journal of Economics and Finance established Darity as the 'founder of stratification economics.' His varied research interests have also included the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African American reparations and the economics of black reparations, and social and economic policies that affect inequities by race and ethnicity. For the latter, he has been described as "perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality."
Ira De Augustine Reid was a prominent sociologist and writer who wrote extensively on the lives of black immigrants and communities in the United States. He was also influential in the field of educational sociology. He held faculty appointments at Atlanta University, New York University, and Haverford College, one of very few African American faculty members in the United States at white institutions during the era of "separate but equal."
Aldon Douglas Morris is a professor of sociology and an award-winning scholar, with interests including social movements, civil rights, and social inequality. He is the 2021 president of the American Sociological Association.
Mary Pattillo is Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. As of 2016, she has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in African American Studies and has been a Faculty Associate in Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research since 2004. She has formerly served as chair of the Northwestern University Department of Sociology.
Delores P. Aldridge is an American sociologist. Aldridge was the first African-American faculty member at Emory University, and the founder of the first African American and African studies program in the American south.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award is given annually by the American Sociological Association to a scholar among its members whose cumulative body of work constitutes a significant contribution to the advancement of sociology. Formerly called simply the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the award was renamed in 2006 to honor pioneering American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois.
The Association of Black Sociologists (ABS) is an American learned society dedicated to the advancement of scholarship by African American sociologists. It is based in Chicago, Illinois. Its official journal is Issues in Race & Society, which it publishes in a partnership with Vanderbilt University's Peabody College.
Howard Francis Taylor is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, where he was formerly the director of the African-American Studies program. He is known for his 1980 book The IQ Game, in which he reanalyzed data from several previous reared-apart twin studies of the heritability of IQ. The book concluded, controversially, that the influence of genes on individual differences in IQ scores was small.
