School of Public Affairs welcomes Burrel Vann

The San Diego State University School of Public Affairs welcomes Burrel Vann to the Criminal Justice faculty this fall.

Prior to coming to SDSU, Vann was a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, where he was affiliated with the Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy and the Date Science Initiative.

Burrel’s research tackles questions central to cultural and political change. Specifically, focusing on how individuals and organizations shift dominant perceptions of contested issues, and how policymakers and the general public respond to these attempts. Through research, he contributes to a variety of fields, including stratification, political sociology, social movements/collective behavior, and race, while employing a broad range of quantitative and computational methods.

Burrel’s research appears in American Sociological Review, Mobilization, and Sociology Compass, and has been presented to a variety of professional (e.g ASA, SSSP, PSA) and non-technical audiences. In addition, his work has won awards from the Ford Foundation (in 2014 and 2016), the Center for the Study of Democracy, and the Data Science Initiative, as well as paper awards from the ASA Section on Methodology and the SSSP Drinking and Drugs Division.

In addition to research, he has taught several methods and statistics classes, including Social Research Methods, Statistics for the Social Sciences, and Graduate Statistics, where students are introduced to new and innovative methodologies. As an educator, he teaches and mentors students from various backgrounds, and draw on their diverse identities as a way for them to connect to the material. Burrel’s pedagogy centers on illuminating the process of social change by having students (1) critique commonplace understandings of society and social relations, (2) understand how structure shapes their own biographies, and (3) provide them with tools for analyzing the social world. Therefore, in courses like Collective Behavior & Social Movements and Justices Studies, students learn about the persistence of inequality and develop skills for creating social change.

For more information visit the School of Public Affairs at spa.sdsu.edu.

The content within this article has been edited by Lizbeth Persons.