Sociology Reading List

There are so many brilliant examples of sociological inquiry in the world that it can often be difficult to compress into a single block (or even a single major). Whether you're looking for block break reading or are an alum hoping to re-connect with your undergraduate major, check out some of the books from this faculty-curated reading list!

CC Alum

Programming Skills for Data Science (Freeman)

The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out (Kucinskas)

Classics & Theorydubois

Distinction (Bourdieu)

Black Feminist Thought (Collins)

The Souls of Black Folks (Du Bois)

Ain't No Makin' It (McLeod)

Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Morris)

Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (Robinson)

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber)

Class

$2 a Day (Edin)

Nickled and Dimed (Ehrenreich)

Crime & Punishment

Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (Ralph)

Punished: Policing in the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (Rios)

Education

Privilege (Khan)

Savage Inequalities (Kozol)

Gender & Sexuality

Dude You're a Fag (Pascoe)

Housing & Urban Studiesdownout

Evicted (Desmond)

Sidewalk (Duneier)

A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America (Freeman)

The Color of Law (Rothstein)

The Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics (Schafran)

Down, Out, and Under Arrest (Stuart)

Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place (Sullivan)

Immigration

Immigrant Families (Menjivar, Schmalzbauer, & Abrego)

Brokered Boundaries: Creating Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (Massey & Sanchez)

Media & Culture

Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman)

Bowling Alone (Putnam)

Race & Privilegecoates

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Anderson)

Racism without Racists (Bonilla-Silva)

The Case for Reparations (Coates)

The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Cramer)

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (DiAngelo)

White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America (Hagerman)

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild)

Unequal Childhoods (Lareau)

Resistance and Social Movements

Resistance through Rituals (Hall & Jefferon)

Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Scott)

Surviving State Terror: Women's Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (Sutton)

Report an issue - Last updated: 12/17/2020