Urban, Race and Migration
Urban Sociology at MSU emphasizes global transformation as central to shaping urban and metropolitan regions where an ever-enlarging portion of the world's population resides. Urban life is not confined to the traditional tenements, factories, and skyscrapers of the past century but incorporates suburban and exurban areas, now containing greater populations than central cities. The Urban, Race and Migration sub-theme also focuses on race and ethnicity for studying the social structure, conflict, cooperation, social meanings, and consequences of race and ethnicity, which provide significant bases of social organization, stratification, identity, and life chances. Key foci include relations between race and ethnicity and other bases of social inequality, solidarity, and identity such as gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, generation, language, and spatial location. The third component of this sub-theme is the sociology of migration, which studies the unparalleled migration arising from both long-term and recent social, political, economic, cultural, and technological transformations. It addresses the exit, reception, and incorporation of labor migrants, refugees, transnationals, and sojourners in distinct international, national, regional, and local political, economic, and cultural contexts. The three foci of urban, race and migration come together in the Department’s longterm emphasis on African and Asian diasporas.
