Community and Environmental Sociology Major Requirements

Stats 301, Stats 371, Economics 310, Psychology 210, Psychology 280, Geography 360, Political Science 551, Math Stats 310, and General Business 303 can be substituted for the C&E Soc 360 requirement. Please be aware that Math Stats 310 and General Business 303 don’t fulfill the Quant B requirement.

All of our majors take a “capstone course” toward the end of their undergraduate studies. One capstone section is always “community-engaged”, with students engaging in a large impactful research project with a community group. Students have had the chance to be part of amazing projects. Five years ago the very first offering of the capstone worked with a diverse group of residents in southwest Madison who wanted to establish a new community center for their youth. The capstone class worked with residents on research to learn about zoning, building code, and accessibility law. And they studies how other community centers operated so that residents could put together a proposal to the city government. A second capstone class (because goals like this take time to achieve) did research with residents to learn not just what they would want from such a center but also what talents they could bring. The residents took that research and got a unanimous vote from the Madison City Council and there is now a new community center on Theresa Terrace in Madison. Two years ago another capstone class worked with Neighborhood House–Madison’s oldest community center. Digging in archives and interviewing people, the students’ pieced together all 100 years of Neighborhood House’s history in time for their centennial celebration in 2016. This past year another capstone class worked with the Urban Community Arts Network–a group of Hip-Hop artists and their supporters–to study the question of whether Hip-Hop performances were more associated with violence than other music genres. The students started with a database of eight years of police data on calls from all the bars in Madison–over 4,000 calls. They then added information on whether there was a music performance for each call, and what genre it was. The results, which found that Hip-Hop is not associated with greater violence than other genres, made a local media splash and helped UCAN convince the city government to establish an entertainment equity task force. And the project received a University of Wisconsin-Madison Community-University Partnership Award as a best example of The Wisconsin Idea.