Welcome to the Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies! GSS provides a unique opportunity to integrate the disciplinary approaches of anthropology, geography, and sociology with cross-disciplinary theorizing and research.
Our BA, MA, and Ph.D. programs focus on four overlapping themes:
Identities and Inequalities
Migrations and Diasporas
Nature-Society
Utilizing comparative, transnational, diasporic, and global perspectives, GSS pursues research on these themes through a variety of theoretical approaches and by utilizing qualitative, quantitative, and applied research methods. The program’s research and teaching themes reflect and resonate with FIU’s location in one of the world’s most dynamic regions: the greater metropolitan area of Miami—a hemispheric crossroads of sociocultural, political, economic, and environmental forces bridging the United States with the Caribbean and Latin America, the Atlantic region, and the world at large.
The program’s inclusion within the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) affords students a wealth of research and associated opportunities through FIU’s Latin American and Caribbean Center; Program in African and African Diaspora Studies; Institute for Asian Studies; European Union Center; and Center for Labor Research and Studies, to name just a few. GSS collaborates with its partner departments within SIPA and the School of Environment and Society (SEAS). It also maintains close relationships with programs such as Women’s Studies; the departments of History and Psychology; the Stempel School of Public Health; and the College of Medicine.
For further information about GSS’s programs, activities, and community, please click our web site’s links to the department’s Undergraduate Programs and Graduate Programs. In addition, we cordially invite you to inquire about us by contacting our department chair, program directors, and the presidents of our student associations.
We Affirm
In our teaching and research, we faculty in FIU’s Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies (GSS) are committed to uncovering the historical, sociocultural, and economic roots of structural inequalities in societies. In pursuit of that goal, we align with FIU’s values of truth in generating and disseminating knowledge, freedom of thought and expression, and respect for diversity. We seek to support through our teaching and research greater social, racial, and environmental justice in societies at all levels from the local to the global. Conversely, we are dedicated to critically examining those social and political efforts that seek to divide us in our common humanity—be they based on gender, race, religion, sexuality or nationality—in an effort to reduce the violence, oppression, and inequalities that they generate.
Moreover, the GSS faculty affirm our support for efforts, be they academic, journalistic, or political, that share our values and goals of promoting diversity and equality at all levels. These include university and educational curricula, such as ours, that critically examine the roots of inequalities, social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, journalistic efforts, such as the New York Times Magazine 1619 Project, practical efforts, such as diversity training, and theoretical constructs, such as critical race theory. We further affirm the American ideal of the university as a forum for free thought and speech and reject all efforts to stifle those or to intimidate students and faculty into silence in the face of injustice. We view these values and affirmations as constituting the foundation for educating an informed, free-thinking, and publicly engaged citizenry.