Sociology as the "trending" discipline?

[sciencegirl]

Hey all - I just posted my thoughts about why the admissions process is so weird to this cycle, and I mentioned the increased competition/lower acceptance rates of places such as Wisconsin.

One thought that I wanted to throw out there is do you think there are more applications to Sociology phD programs than usual because of a drifting into the discipline from others? (coupled with the economy?). That is, not only are there more grad applicants, but that more students from other fields are applying into Sociology instead of other ones?

I think this might be true in my case - where I think if I was applying 5-10 years ago, I would have looked into American Studies programs, maybe even social justice programs - I decided to focus on Sociology. Partially because the field seems to be opening up a bit more, that Sociology has seemed to be more encompassing of many different areas and being more accepting of interdisciplinary approaches. Also, anecdotally, I've heard of students from other disciplines, such as history, economics, psychology, ethnic studies, cultural studies - turning towards Sociology more and more as their phD field from different undergrad ones.

Any thoughts on this? From my biased perspective, I would argue that maybe sociology is becoming a more "it " discipline in the social sciences?

[sleepycat]

I can first hand experience that there is a shift. I noticed several programs are taking a wide variety of students and disciplines. This is really great for me because I have a background in interdisciplinary studies. Also I use ideas from other disciplines and see how they fit within sociology and the social sciences at large. I think that by staying within one discipline we loose different ways to study current phenomena as the traditional methods could be loosing some flexible and liquidness of what we are studying now.

[Roll Right]

I'm not sure there is a shift. Sociology has a history of encorporating intellectuals from other fields. It's such a broad discipline. Almost any liberal art figures into sociology in some way.