Social Sciences

Janel Benson, assistant professor of sociology, has joined the debate about family values on The New York Times. Benson, who specializes in sociology of the family, is one of the contributors to the Times‘ Room for Debate section of its website.

Four geography majors from Colgate were nominated for competitive internships at the National Geographic Society (NGS), and, in a clean sweep, all four were accepted for assignments this year.

To paraphrase Michael Stipe and R.E.M., 2012 could be the end of the world as we know it. And pioneering archaeoastronomer Tony Aveni, Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies, has every reason to feel fine.

Every day for 26 years, Justin Jackson ’78 may have been “someone else” — but he was still a Colgate alumnus.

Last week was a busy week at Colgate University. While this is a mini-highlight of what was making news, you can skip this post and go right to comments to tell us your news from the past week. Here are just some of the things we were talking about:

In the past week, Colgate University faculty answered the call to journalists who sought out qualified experts. As 2012 approaches, journalists are calling on Professor Anthony Aveni for his insights into the Mayan calendar. Bookshelves and movie theaters are full of prophecies, theories, and predictions that this date marks the end of the world, or […]

(Editor’s Note: This article was written by Paula Meltser ’13) I was one of the 16 Colgate students on the London Economics Study Group who found themselves in the midst of the relentless debt crisis that has engulfed Europe. Not only did we study the evolving economic problem, we lived it first-hand.

Jessica Graybill, assistant professor of geography, needed to look no farther than Utica, N.Y., for students in her Urban Transformations seminar to experience the cultural, spatial, and environmental changes brought about by refugee migration. The city’s leaders openly welcome international newcomers — most recently from Bosnia, Belarus, and Vietnam — as a strategy for economic […]

On a rainy October night in 1961, Soviet and American tanks sat muzzle to muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous boundary between East and West Berlin. Fifty years later, Frederick Kempe, chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council and author of Berlin: 1961, stood before an audience in Persson Auditorium to discuss the issues that […]

Patricia Hill Collins, a social theorist who studies race, gender, social class, work, and family, came to Colgate recently to deliver the annual W.E.B. and Shirley Graham DuBois Lecture, hosted by the Africana/Latin American Studies Department.