Humanities & Society

In 2015, Washington University re-established the Department of Sociology in Arts & Sciences. Concentrating on the origins and impacts of inequality, faculty and students are investigating some of the nation’s most critical and urgent social challenges.

In just a few years, students have come to think of the sociology department as a home, as their own special place at the university.

Two U.S. retailers made moves this week to regulate their gun sales based on principle — moves that legislators failed to make in recent years despite public outcry following each incident in a line of mass-shooting tragedies. A pair of Washington University in St. Louis experts say that these actions represent “an expansion of corporate social responsibility,” even if the retailers financially may suffer amid something of a consumer backlash.

Children as young as 3 already are beginning to recognize and follow important rules and patterns governing how letters in the English language fit together to make words, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

America spoke in November, one month after the candidates collided in the presidential debate held Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis. In the days that followed the historic 2016 election, faculty experts across campus offered their perspectives on the economy, the legislative responses, the cultural and global ripple effects.

At a transformative moment in our nation’s history, when America’s “Brexit vote” came to pass, where better than Washington University to bring together the thought leaders and experts from disparate fields covering the littered landscape that was, is and forever will be Election 2016?

The cost of incarceration in the United States exceeds $1 trillion, or six percent of gross domestic product. That dwarfs the amount spent on corrections alone, finds a new study from Washington University in St. Louis.

As much as we might try to leave personal lives at home, the personality traits of a spouse have a way of following us into the workplace, exerting a powerful influence on promotions, salaries, job satisfaction and other measures of professional success, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

Surveillance is everywhere, from street corner cameras to the subject of books and movies. “We talk a lot about why surveillance is bad, but we don’t really know why,” says Neil Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “We only have a vague intuition about it, which is why courts don’t protect it. We know we don’t like it, and that it has something to do with privacy, but beyond that, the details can be fuzzy.” Richards’ new article on the topic, “The Danger of Surveillance,” will be published in the next issue of the Harvard Law Review.

In a modern society struggling to loose the grip of a lengthy economic recession, is the American dream really attainable? The dream may still be possible, though much more difficult to achieve, say a renowned macroeconomist and one of America’s foremost experts on poverty, co-teachers of a course on the American Dream this semester at Washington University in St. Louis.