About Department of Sociology

Without confinement to any specific areas or themes sociologists engage in social science basic research. In doing so methods and theories aimed at the studying, understanding and explaining of social phenomena are developed.
Research and education at the Department of Sociology reflects this span and diversity. Here you will meet teachers and researchers who focus on areas like work, organisation, health, education, welfare, ageing, migration, social movements, environment, food, waste, housing and urban settings, the state, law, networks, social psychology, class, gender, ethnicity, racism, violence, theory, elites, trust and intimacy.

Each semester about five hundred students are engaged in undergraduate studies, either as enrolled in any of the programmes hosted by the department, or in any of the numerous single subject courses, which can also be included, as compulsory or elective courses, in programmes hosted by other departments.

At the department Master studies can be carried out through single subject courses or through the Master programme in Social sciences.

The department staff comprises a total of about fifty researchers, teachers and administrators. Through the graduate programme, each year about five doctoral dissertations are completed.

History in brief

The department of Sociology at Uppsala University dates back to 1947 when Torgny Segerstedt, until then professor in Moral Philosophy, became the first professor in Sociology at a Swedish university.

While earlier representatives for the discipline - still without a department of it's own - had been emphasizing the theoretical aspects of the discipline, professor Segerstedt, without letting go of the former added an empirical stance, which up to this day has been characteristic for the pursuing of the discipline at Uppsala University.