The Division of Sociology and Anthropology, tucked away a bit off the beaten path in Knapp Hall, can be easy to overlook in West Virginia University’s sea of 193 degree programs.

But a recent explosion of books by three professors, addressing a diverse mix of societal issues, as well as more works to come off the presses soon, signal this small department is ready to make a big noise.

Currently, the sociology department has only 13 faculty members required to do research. To have three of those professors with books out at the same time is quite a feat, said Melissa Latimer, outgoing chair of the Division and director of the WVU ADVANCE Center.

With such topics as hate crimes, urban neighborhoods and feudalism, the works “showcase the diversity of research in the department and the enormous growth in book writing,” Latimer said. “These topics are all over the map but they’re connected. There’s an inequality theme to all of them.”

This is more than a reflection of the academic growth of the department. “Writing is crucial not only for other sociologists but for students and even the general public,” said Jim Nolan, one of the current trio of authors, whose book deals with hate crimes.

“It’s important to get your writing out,” he said, “whether it’s in a book or an article.”

Topics such as those tackled in the department’s books not only concern individuals inside the walls of academia but they touch the lives of everyday folks in the real world.

Nolan’s mantra is that ordinary people can thwart prejudice, discrimination and bias on the local level, whether it be in their homes, work or neighborhood. The topic of hate should concern all people, not just college students and professors, he says.

Prejudice, neighborhood conflicts and political systems are engrained as societal problems. Professors believe studying those problems can only help better society.

Several departments at WVU expect their faculty to write books. That has not always been the case with the sociology and anthropology department, which has traditionally pushed its professors to publish articles in academic journals. Getting published in this platform is an art in itself, as peers in the field must first review and approve the author’s work before it sees print.

But the ways in which WVU sociologists and anthropologists present their research have evolved. More professors are now taking the book route, skipping the creative limitations associated with writing for peer-reviewed journals.

In recent years, sociologists have churned out enough books to force the department to change its promotion and tenure guidelines, said Latimer, whose own research interests include gender, race and class inequality.

As a requirement for tenure, professors must have a specificnumber of articles published in peer-reviewed journals. The guidelines have been modified to also include books, due to their recent influx.

When Latimer first came to WVU in 1994, she noticed that the only faculty member to devote time to book writing, in addition to peer-reviewed articles, was professor Larry Nichols, who preceded Latimer as department chair. With Nichols serving as a precursor, a wave of new sociology professors arriving in the past decade has lent its hand to the department’s progress, Latimer said.

Nichols joined the department in 1985 and acknowledged changes he’s seen firsthand.

“When I was hired, the department was viewed as more teaching-oriented than research-oriented,” said Nichols, an expert on terrorism, white-collar crime, crime/deviance in the media, among other social problems. “Since then, the demands for research have risen.”

An increased emphasis on research isn’t the only improvement Nichols has observed. He lauds today’s department for its collegial atmosphere. Faculty members collaborate more on conference papers, grant applications and publications. They even travel together and seek one another’s company after work outside of Knapp Hall, where the sociology department is located.

Now the department holds annual picnics, holiday gatherings and trips to conferences. These changes, in turn, benefit students.

“Teaching will be more lively and interesting when faculty are active in research and can talk about it in class,” Nichols said. “There is a dimension of ‘real experience’ that goes beyond the textbook, and faculty can share their personal enthusiasm.”

Nichols also credits the department’s growth to the implementation of a criminology concentration in the mid-2000s. Only about 250 students had majors within the Division of Sociology and Anthropology in 2000. Last year, nearly 1,000 students declared the department their academic home. The sharp increase is largely due to the criminology concentration.

“The former culture of the department was opposed to a focused curriculum, perhaps because members feared that it might create factions and internal conflict,” Nichols asserted. “The department offered ‘a bit of this, and a bit of that,’ and attracted relatively few majors.Now, with a focused curriculum and many majors, the College can point to us with pride, and they do.”

Some of the issues now hotly debated in sociology classes had not been thoroughly dissected beforehand.

Hate crime is one of those topics. Bringing with him a wealth of real world experiences as a former police officer in Wilmington, Del. and FBI unit chief, Nolan has taught a hate crime course at WVU since the early-2000s. The FBI defines a hate crime as a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

Nolan’s course explores all aspects of this social problem, from examining who are the offenders and victims of hate crime to how law enforcement responds to such incidents. His dedication to the topic led him to co-author The Violence of Hate: Confronting Racism, Anti-Semitism, and Other Forms of Bigotry with Jack Levin, a sociology professor at Northeastern University. This book – along with The Essential Hate Crime Reader, which Nolan edited with sociology instructor Susie Bennett – is a required reading for his hate crime classes.

“An important aspect to the book is that it points out that the causes of hate violence are not really the hatemongers people who are ranting and raving about the inferiority of, and danger presented by, different minority groups,” said Nolan, whose strides in the classroom earned him the title of West Virginia’s 2010 Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “It’s because the average person won’t get involved to stop it. It’s important for the average person to develop an understanding of the true nature of hate violence. Most of it occurs because of misunderstanding.”

Nolan said one group that remains largely targeted by hate and discrimination is the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He encourages his students to share stories, discuss current hate crime news, and explore approaches to eradicate bias on the local and global levels.

“Hate is all based on different ways of seeing the world,” he said. “It can only be cleared up through dialogue and exposure along with the courage of individuals to stand together against it.”

Rachael Woldoff, an associate professor, also draws on her classroom experiences for research projects. Her latest undertaking involved three years of fieldwork and 90 interviews that culminated in White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood, published by Cornell University Press.

In a capstone class, Woldoff was teaching students how to utilize United States Census Bureau data. Figures for one working-class urban neighborhood, located in the northeast, caught her eye. From 1990 to 2000, the black population in that area skyrocketed from 2.2 to 58.8 percent. Engaging her sociological imagination, Woldoff ended up driving to the neighborhood.

“I casually started talking to people and thought I’d hear the typical narrative, ‘The whites here left and were afraid of the blacks, crime and violence,’” Woldoff said. “But that’s not what happened.”

Instead, Woldoff discovered that the white residents live in harmony with the black population. In her new book, she highlights three types of residents: The white stayers, the black pioneers and the second-wave blacks.

The white stayers are mostly elderly, Caucasian residents who never left the neighborhood. The stayers compliment the black residents for their acts of kindness, which include shoveling snow for them, Woldoff said.

The second group, the black pioneers, consists of AfricanAmericans who first moved into the neighborhood. These residents take an active approach seeking an integrated, safe and orderly environment for their children.

Slight conflict arises, however, with the addition of the second-wave blacks, the most recent migrants to the neighborhood. This group is uninvolved and isolated from the community, Woldoff said, and their norms on child-rearing and the maintenance of order clash with those of the black pioneers.

“Second-wave blacks are less involved,” said Woldoff, who specializes in crime and community studies. “They like minding their own business and view neighborhood problems as minor and tolerable.”

For example, Woldoff interviewed one second-wave resident who said he would not call police if he witnessed drug dealing on the corner. This is in contrast to pioneers who are more vigilant about controlling not just drug crime but problems like noise, physical dilapidation, and unruly teen behavior.

Woldoff plans to assign the book in her classes this fall. She teaches a course on neighborhoods and crime. She also teaches a popular urban life class that studies the sociology of “The Wire,” the HBO drama series based in Baltimore.

Assistant Professor Josh Woods also released a book this year and has another one coming out. Woods teamed up with Vladimir Shlapentokh, a sociology professor at Michigan State University, to write Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society.

The idea for this book emanated from Shlapentokh’s research on post-Soviet Russian society. From there, Woods and Shlapentokh examined similarities between European feudal societies of the Middle Ages and contemporary America.

”’Feudal America’ urges readers to think critically about the na�ve labels that are often used to characterize the United States,” Woods said, “labels such as ‘democracy,’ ‘liberal capitalism,’ ‘free markets,’ and ‘meritocracy,’ that are lavishly expressed in social studies textbooks and the speeches of American politicians.

“Exploring American society from the feudal perspective sheds new light on the crippling consequences of social inequality and the gulf that separates the castle-building rich from the working-class poor.”

Woods, who came to WVU in 2009, teaches courses on social psychology and complex organizations. One of his research interests includes the social and psychological responses to terrorism and other perceived threats, which led to his work on yet another book. Freaking Out: A Decade of Living with Terrorism is slated for release in January 2012.

That publication will examine how the 9/11 attacks changed American society, from immigration policy shifts to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

The addition of Woods to the sociology department has bolstered its emphasis on good writing. Besides academic writing, Woods has had short stories, poems and essays published. He has penned more than two dozen opinion pieces for newspapers across the globe including the “Moscow Times” and “USA Today.”

“I always wanted to be a novelist,” Woods said. “I love to write.”

Another assistant professor, Karen Weiss, is slated to release Party School: Crime, Campus and Community under the University Press of New England. That book examines alcohol-related crime and “nuisance” behaviors prevalent at large public universities. Weiss bases this research on survey data collected in 2009 and 2011 at a sports-oriented “party school.” Her students analyze this data for projects in her classes. The book will assess the culture of student conduct, with an emphasis on analyzing the negative impact on excessive drinking on crime victimization and quality of life in a college community, Weiss said.

Not only are the books padding professors’ vitas, but the lessons outlined within those pages are transferring to the classroom and aiding in the development of the sociology department.

By Jake Stump
University Relations/News

-WVU-

js/06/13/11

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