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Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Criminal Justice FALL 2000 NEWSLETTER
This is the first online issue of the department’s biannual newsletter, put out to coincide with pre-registration period. We hope you will find it accessible and useful, and welcome comments and suggestions. –Professor Robert Wood, Chair |
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Dr. Jane Siegel, the department’s newest member, received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and was Co-Principal Investigator on a study of the long-term consequences of child abuse. Before coming to Rutgers, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship from Wellesley College and taught at Widener University. She has already proven herself to be a dedicated and highly productive member of the department. The department expects to hire an additional faculty member in criminal justice for next fall. In two short years, the department’s new Criminal Justice major has grown from 0 to 127. With an additional 87 sociology majors, combined departmental majors come to 214. |
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The department’s first two Winterim courses will be offered over the semester break in 2000-2001. Annette Holba will offer a Criminal Justice course on Sex Crime Units, through an examination of the history, social-cultural context, function, operations and policy issues of sex-crime units in the criminal justice system. Robert Wood will offer a Winterim version of his Sociology and the Internet course, which combines the development of a wide range of internet-based skills along with a sociological look at a new institution that is transforming societies around the world. Each student will research a “virtual place” on the internet and publish his/her findings on the internet. The course will meet in a teaching lab and is limited to 20 students. Further details on both courses are available athttps://www.camden.rutgers.edu/Academics/winterim/classes.html, and, for Dr. Wood’s class, at https://www.camden.rutgers.edu/~wood/445winterim.htm. |
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Several new and seldom-offered courses are included in the course lineup for Spring 2000. Dr. Hazzard-Donald will offer a new course on the Sociology of W.E.B. DuBois the pioneering African American sociologist whose Philadelphia Negro (1899) was arguably the first major empirical work in American sociology. The course carries a prerequisite of Sociological Theory, or else permission of the instructor. Dr. Siegel’s Special Topics course on Children in the Justice System will examine several topics related to the treatment of children who are involved with the justice system, including children in detention, child victims, children whose parents are incarcerated and children in the juvenile court bureaucracy. |
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The Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice has received one of five college-wide grants to develop a spring Service Learning course. The course, which is being co-listed with the Psychology Department, will involve a weekly seminar on Camden’s history, the particular problems faced by its schools, and the importance of technological skills for learning and for job-preparation. Students will also engage in service work at community centers and schools in the city, with a focus on “Bridging the Digital Divide in Camden.” They will be building on the good work, in both the spring and fall 2000 semesters, of sociology student volunteers at the Martin Luther King Community Center’s computer lab. These student volunteers have included Terri Kasper, Felicia Rockko, Christina DiRocco, Mandy Najimi, Tamika Levels (pictured left in the spring semester), and Caroline Demo. |
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Dr. Myra Bluebond-Langner has been appointed the Director of the Center for Children and Childhood Studies, which she has worked tirelessly to create. The Center combines research, education and community outreach, and offers internships for students. Dr. Bluebond-Langner has already secured several major grants to support the Center’s work. Further information about the center, as well as links to many children-related websites, may be found at the Center’s website, maintained by sociology adjunct faculty Monika Wood. Several members of the department are center associates, including Sheila Cosminsky, Drew Humphries, Jon’a Meyer, and Jane Siegel. The website may be accessed at https://children.camden.rutgers.edu/ and is well worth exploring, and includes webpages on research presentations by associates Drew Humphries and Jane Siegel. |
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Professor Goertzel to be Acting Chair in Spring 2001 Dr. Robert Wood, who took over as chair this past July, will be on leave during the spring semester. Dr. Ted Goertzel has agreed to be Acting-Chair for the semester. Dr. Wood will be continuing his research on farm tourism in Europe, its role in sustaining an agricultural landscape and way of life, and the way in which it has been caught up in controversies over the rules of the new global order. While Dr. Wood will be in Europe for part of the semester, he intends to make himself available to his advisees when he is in the area. He will resume his chairpersonship at the end of the semester. |
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Professor Jon’a Meyer recently returned from field research on the legal system of the Navajo Nation, particularly the restorative justice-based Peacemaking Program. Dr. Meyer’s research puts her at the cutting edge not just of Native American justice studies but also of efforts to explore alternative legal systems as a way of rethinking our own. Dr. Meyer will return to teaching in the spring semester, and she has written a letter to students describing her latest experiences. |
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The Department’s second annual Undergraduate Research Poster Session, co-sponsored with the Department of Psychology, attracted over 100 presenters and guests in April. The third annual event will be coming up in April 2001, and students are encouraged to present their research from both the fall and spring semesters. Photos from last spring’s event are available at https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/posteralbum/photoalbum.htm |
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The Eastern Sociological Society will be meeting in Philadelphia, March 1-4, at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel. Several department faculty members will be making presentations. The department has obtained funding from Dean Marsh to pay for registrations and expenses of students interested in attending. If you are interested in attending, please see Drs. Wood or Goertzel for details. Shown at left are two Rutgers-Camden sociology students, Agatha Curran and Bruce Carroll, presenting their research at the 1998 ESS meetings. |
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With a Rutgers Dialogues grant, Professor Robert Wood has been exploring the use of streaming audio and video on the web. One serendipitous outcome of this project has been the creation of an extensive website for Julianne Baird, the internationally-acclaimed soprano and Rutgers-Camden Music Professor. Designed by sociology adjunct faculty member Monika Wood, the website makes extensive use of streaming technology to bring Julianne Baird’s music and accomplishments to a worldwide audience. Pictures from a celebration to unveil the website on October 11, 2000 may be seen at https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/webevent/bairdevent.htm |
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Also supported with a Rutgers Dialogues grant, the department’s website has been reorganized and expanded throughout the year with the goal of providing a common point of reference for the departmental curriculum. The site is organized around two central pages, the Department Homepage, and the Web-Enhanced Curriculum Homepage. Accessible from these pages are such resources as faculty profiles, over 25 online course syllabi, advising FAQs, instructions on how to subscribe to the departmental e-mailing list, plagiarism and citation guidelines, MicroCase resources, Virtual Tours, student research opportunities, recommended websites, and more. The department’s homepage address is https://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/. Students are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with the policies and resources at this site. |
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All majors in the department now graduate with a set of sophisticated and useful data-analysis skills, thanks to the integration of MicroCase into the curriculum. In addition to the limited version of the program that comes with student workbooks, the Department holds a site license for the full program, which comes with dozens of datasets. The full version, MicroCase 4.5, may be accessed in any of the computer labs on campus; in addition, students may borrow a disk to install it on their home computers. Thanks to the work of recent graduate Kim VanBuskirk, useful descriptions of these datasets are available online as part of a broad set of MicroCase Resources. Also to be found there are instructions by recent graduate Debra Burock on how to create new datasets within MicroCase. |
