Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
Faculty and students active in the sociology department’s Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality research cluster are concerned with understanding social inequality through an intersectional lens, meaning as experienced by people with membership in multiple social groups at both the individual and structural levels.
The MSU faculty who study race, class, gender, and sexuality have considerable expertise and conduct research in the following areas:
- the racialization of religion;
- minoritized parenting practices;
- intra-group diversity and capital of Latinx people;
- contemporary racial and ethnic relations;
- substance abuse among minority and majority populations in the U.S.;
- citizen science and community-engaged research methods;
- racialization of Muslim Americans;
- multidimensional and intersectional measures and analyses;
- the Anglophone Caribbean;
- cross-country comparative data from Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan;
- how social identities shape how individuals interpret and conceptualize heterosexism;
- transphobia, cissexism, and queer resilience and resistance;
- urban governance and the built environment in comparative perspective;
- academic and social well-being of adolescents as they move into adulthood;
- STEM disciplines and practices for advancing equity;
- human and social capital;
- aging and the lifecourse;
- normativity and social regulation;
- who constructs evidence, how does evidence confer authority to individuals and groups, and how is it
- mobilized by social actors;
- historical-comparative sociology.
Faculty members have many ongoing collaborations including with scholars across MSU’s College of Social Science, College of Arts and Letters, School of Public Health, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, College of Medicine, AgBio Research, College of Education, College of Communication Arts and Sciences, Environmental Science and Policy Program, MSU Ethics Institute, MSU Institute of Water Research, James Madison College, and Lyman Briggs College.
In recent years, research projects of affiliated faculty have been funded by the Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, the College of Social Science, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Economic and Social Research Council, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.