Director’s Message
Welcome to the School of Social Sciences at UNC!
With the academic disciplines of Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Sociology, and the multidisciplinary Social Sciences Program, our school represents a deep pool of knowledge and understanding about humankind.
Anthropologists delve into humanity’s biological and cultural origins and history as well as explore, through a multitude of interdisciplinary paths, its diverse contemporary belief systems, institutions, and lifestyles.
Our economists seek to understand how human societies, individually and collectively, create and modify economic systems through time and space, using that knowledge to both understand that critical aspect of cultural behavior and benefit human existence through practical applications of that understanding.
Geography, like anthropology, is holistic and multidisciplinary in its scope, seeking to understand the complex interrelationship of space, natural resources, cultural systems, and ecological contexts of living and non-living components of our plant earth.
Sociologists seek to understand how we structure our social relationships at the individual, family, community, and societal (and multi-societal) levels to create living, functioning, and constantly adapting human societies. They then apply that knowledge to assist humanity in building a better world through greater understanding of ourselves and our fellow travelers on this celestial and fragile sphere.
Our Social Science Program with its degree tracks in secondary education and liberal arts weaves elements of all the above disciplines in providing a firm foundation of knowledge in human social and cultural behavior for a variety of career paths, including high school teaching.
If your interest is in any of these areas of study, I encourage you to visit our programs’ Web pages, which you’ll find listed in the navigation bar on the left, and contact myself, individual program offices, and program coordinators, whose e-mail addresses and phone numbers are listed on their respective Web sites.
