Life & Letters Magazine

Department of Sociology

Bringing the Liberal Arts to Texas Prisons

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The Texas Prison Education Initiative offers college-credit courses to incarcerated students in the Austin area. The courses, which span subjects from physics to philosophy, are taught by volunteer instructors and offered at no cost to students. Since it began in 2018, the program has served some 230 students in over 400 classes. But there’s still far more demand than they can meet.

Leaf Through a Good Book

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Keep your to-read list up-to-date with our fall book list, featuring a selection of titles from College of Liberal Arts faculty members and alumni.

The Body’s Real-Time Response to Racism

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For the first time, researchers have recorded how the body responds when someone is confronted with racism or discrimination in the real world, providing new insight into health disparities in the United States and the stress experienced by students-of-color.

Rebooting Our Lives After COVID-19

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The world’s new reality amid the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to confront issues and critically think about how to revive communities slowly, safely and sustainably.

Smile, You’re on Camera: Behind the Lens of 24/7 Surveillance

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“Even a strutting exhibitionist has something to hide: certain diary entries, genetic predispositions, financial mistakes, medical crises, teenage embarrassments, antisocial compulsions, sexual fantasies, radical dreams,” writes Randolph Lewis. “We all have something that we want to shield from public view. The real question is: Who gets to pull the curtains? And increasingly: How will we […]

Where India Goes

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UT Austin economist Dean Spears and sociologist Diane Coffey founded the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.) in 2011 with the goal of improving health and well-being in India. They focus on an important driver of economic development: the health of children. Despite rapid economic growth, India’s infant and under-five mortality rate continues to be […]

An Educated Decision

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Voter turnout in the U.S. is below turnout in most other advanced democracies, with only about 60 percent of eligible voters participating in the past four presidential elections and about 40 percent participating in midterm elections. While prior research indicates that those with higher levels of education are more likely to vote, new research shows […]

The Cost of Crime

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Despite crime rates being at a historic low, the United States is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve an 80 percent recidivism rate. We’ve spent $1 trillion during the past 40 years on criminal justice, not including $1 trillion more on the war on drugs. William Kelly, a professor of sociology at The […]

The Criminal Justice System is a Massive Failure. Here’s a Solution

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Contrary to logic, intuition and common sense, the hard fact is that punishment does not reduce criminal offending. This may be a difficult one for some to swallow, especially since the past 45 years and more than $1 trillion have been spent on punishment as the centerpiece of American criminal justice policy. We essentially bet […]

Your Turn to Do the Dishes

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Most young women – and men – prefer shared household responsibilities There’s no shortage of advice for women these days about how to balance work and family — everything from becoming a supermom who can “lean in” at the workplace and do it all, to embracing the role of a full-time homemaker. But when given […]

Depression: Making Treatment Personal

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For the estimated 350 million people worldwide who suffer from depression, the health consequences go far beyond “feeling down.” In fact, it is a leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people with symptoms of depression will never receive treatment, and for those diagnosed with major […]

Borderline: The Politics, Law and Identity of Immigration

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Temperatures hovered around the triple digits in deep South Texas when the children arrived on the U.S.-Mexico border. They traveled alone, without parents. They traveled from the faraway mountains of Guatemala and El Salvador and the depths of the world’s most violent city — San Pedro Sula in Honduras. Their numbers grew over months until […]

The Benefits to Paid Family Leave That Nobody is Talking About

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This month marks 22 years since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act. The FMLA was an important first step toward improving the lives of American workers by helping them secure unpaid leave from their jobs for a variety of family issues, while protecting their employment security. But the FMLA left much to […]

Early Poverty Linked to Obesity in Women

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Adolescent girls who grow up in poor households are more likely than their male counterparts to become overweight or obese, according to a new study by Tetyana Pudrovska, assistant professor of sociology. The study, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, shows long-lasting consequences of economic hardship in childhood for the risk of […]