Default | NEWS

2/1/2007 12:11:00 AM

Editor’s note: The Rice community — faculty, staff, students and alumni — are at the heart of the Vision for the Second Century, or V2C. Their conversations with President David Leebron became the V2C, and their commitment and creativity will bring the 10-point plan to life. This series will feature some of those people.

By LYNETTE MCGLAMERY
Special to the Rice News

Vision point: We must visibly and substantially increase our commitment to our research mission and raise our research and scholarship profile.

The Department of Sociology is infused these days with an energy that is helping to elevate the visibility of its research to new heights.

The unifying force behind this surge is the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life (CORRUL). Founded in 2005 by Michael Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology at Rice, CORRUL is the only such center in the nation. 

The idea for the center came to Emerson when he was a student at Loyola University in Chicago and had to travel to the downtown campus on the train. He was amazed that within blocks of each other were one of the largest, poorest housing projects in the country and the “Gold Coast,” where some of the nation’s wealthiest live.

“I wanted to understand how there could be different social worlds — racially, economically, religiously — so close together, why there was almost no interaction between these worlds and what the consequences of these different social worlds were,” he said.

In 2004, Emerson left Rice after five years to become director of a center for the study of race and religion at Notre Dame. He returned to Rice a year later to start CORRUL when he learned of Rice’s new vision for research that uses Houston as a laboratory and contributes to the city’s vibrancy.

“Like Chicago in the 1930s, Houston is a diverse, rapidly growing city — an unparalleled site for research relevant to a world that is for the first time more urban than rural,” he said. “A center like CORRUL can give Houston and other growing cities the information and resources to help them identify and address issues that arise from urban growth and diversity.”

Elizabeth Long, chair of the sociology department, said CORRUL has provided the infrastructure for the department to consolidate its vision and mission around the themes of the center.

She said the center has provided young scholars in the department, including assistant directors Holly Heard and Michael Lindsay, an opportunity to lead and plan center programs.

 “All of our faculty are excited about the center and have taken an ownership in its success,” she said. “With a strategic vision and a group of collegial people, the center will greatly increase our research visibility in Houston and nationally.”

CORRUL also has brought the social sciences together with other parts of the university to advance Rice’s vision for teaching, research and outreach.

The center has teamed with Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice’s Shell Center for Sustainability and two Chinese research organizations to study the challenges that face U.S. and Chinese coastal cities, like Houston and Shanghai, whose economies are heavily supported by the petrochemical industry. CORRUL researchers also are working with other university researchers on national projects such as Portraits of American Life Studies, where the same people are interviewed every three years to show how their lives change.

CORRUL provides research opportunities for undergraduates as well, which is especially important since the department currently has no graduate program. Sociology Professor Stephen Klineberg’s Houston Area Survey is now under the center’s auspices as well as new courses that provide students with hands-on research experiences in the Houston area.

In the Urban Life and Systems course, groups of students are each assigned a poor and an affluent neighborhood to study. They must learn the histories of the communities, eat in their restaurants, volunteer in their community organizations, attend their houses of worship and conduct interviews with residents and business, religious and political leaders. At the end of the semester, the students produce a comparative report and make a presentation to the class as well as to community leaders. These cultural histories are then archived in the center.

Celina Davila, a Hanszen College sophomore, said the class and her group’s work in Magnolia Park, a predominately Hispanic community in Houston’s East End, were eye-opening experiences.

“We not only became more knowledgeable about the socioeconomic areas of Houston, but we got to see the theories we read about in class applied to the real world,” she said.

For the research methods course this past year, Emerson, Long and Jill Foote of the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management secured a grant to evaluate the financial training classes conducted by the Women’s Resource Center. Next year, the class will partner with Rice’s Center for Civic Engagement and the city to study the uses of Hermann Park.

 Long said Emerson takes an active role in the community to determine the issues that CORRUL research can help with as well as to find community groups to partner with.

Emerson said he just truly cares about making life better for urban people and is excited to be in Houston and at Rice, both of which are on the move to greater things.