Don't forget to change your clocks.
Click here for more details.
Click here for more on applying to Mount Allison.

Sociology expands our horizons, challenges us to think critically about the world around us, and prepares us to participate in that world.

Sociology involves the study of people as they interact with one another in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts.
When you study sociology you examine the role of powerful institutions like the media or the education system and how these might be changed. You also study emerging phenomena like cyber culture. You look at inequality, ethnicity, and questions of power and you do it in an innovative way. For example, in a course in feminist perspectives, students have designed and run a camp for young people, teaching media literacy and enhancing self-esteem.

The Program
The Department offers a Minor, a Major, and an Honours program in sociology.

The first-year experience in sociology at Mount Allison University provides students with an engaging introduction to the study of social problems with a course that uses dynamic class interactions and assignments, which are designed to build conceptual and applied skills.

The second year course is designed for students to gain a firm grounding in the general approaches taken in sociology and to promote the critical thinking, methodological, and writing skills necessary for advanced work. Third year courses emphasize theoretical approaches, analytical methods, and their application to major substantive areas of sociological interest. The areas covered reflect the strengths and interests of the faculty, and are designed to give students exposure to a broad range of material. Fourth year courses allow students to work with greater independence, and in more depth, on a range of topics.

What to do with Sociology
Graduates in sociology pursue a variety of career paths. Many go to graduate school in sociology and related fields such as social history, criminology, and psychology and have received major graduate awards such as the Commonwealth Scholarship and the SSHRCC Graduate Fellowship to do so. Others have gone on to law and business school or have entered other professional and social-service programs such as social work, teaching, library science, the ministry, and occupational therapy.

The following is a partial list of occupations and fields of our recent graduates: program consultant, non-profit organization, human resources coordinator, political advisor, organizational change consultant, director of policy and planning, government, professor, lawyer, corporate finance, and journalist.

You can read more about these graduates and their experiences on our web page.

Our Research
The faculty of sociology actively participate in research in a number of areas. Current research projects include:

• media analysis of the war on terror;
• the experiences of mothering, motherhood, and mothers;
• monopoly ownership of the media;
• an intellectual biography of economic historian Karl Polanyi; and
• the interconnections between national identity, globalization and work.

Previous research has been done on the concept of ideology, women and substance abuse, ethnicity in Canada; rental housing relationships in Montreal; women’s anti-feminist social movements; and the ideological treatment of labour issues in the media.

What you can do
Students can carry out their own social research while doing their Honours or as student research assistants. To give you a flavour of what is possible to study in sociology, here are some titles of Honours themes chosen by students in the department:

• “Talking Like a Man: Acts of Resistance, Accommodation, and Change In Women’s Conversational Styles”;
• “Medicalization, Individualism and Othering: Experiencing ADD/ADHD in Schools”;
• “Representation and Identity: 'Knowing' the Armenian Genocide”;
• “White is the Norm: Visible Minority Experience of Identity, Integration and Racism in New Brunswick”; and
• “The Only thing that hasn’t changed is the Sea: Analytical Reflections on Canada’s Sailing Community.”

Department Website

Academic Calendar: Sociology
Academic Calendar: Sociology/Anthropology