About the Department of Sociology

Vision Statement
The Sociology faculty is a community of scholars with diverse intellectual interests and expertise committed to excellence in teaching and research, and is intellectually innovative and informed, grounded in but not bound by our disciplines.  

With students, we are committed to developing our students’ capacities – variously scientific, ethnographic, interpretative, and critical for understanding the social and cultural forces that shape the human experience. We strive to foster a lifelong engagement with questions of social justice.
We bring theoretical, analytical, and methodological rigor to understanding complex social and cultural realities both local and global. We promote ways of imagining and re-imagining the common good and encourage the use of knowledge and skills to realize a more just society.

Mission Statement
The Sociology faculty bring the intellectual traditions of our disciplines in a systematic way to the Georgetown curriculum and to our own research and scholarship.

We teach students the various skills needed to conduct theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous and multifaceted analyses of human social phenomena at both the local and global levels. We offer students direct opportunities to develop and apply those skills through research and experiential learning activities in the Washington, D.C. communities and beyond.

Through our research--both social and anthropological, covering a wide range of topics--we advance the collective understanding of complex social and cultural realities. We are committed--through our scholarship, teaching and service--to fostering imaginations that envision a more just society and which recognize the individual’s contribution to the social production and reproduction of just and unjust practices and institutions.