WashU Sociology's Fall 2026 Colloquium Series: Pamela Oliver

Join the WashU Department of Sociology for the fourth installment of our Fall Colloquium Series, featuring Prof. Pamela Oliver.

Presentation Title: TBA

Pamela Oliver is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. She served as the chair of the Department of Sociology twice and was a member of the Asian American Studies Faculty Advisory Committee for many years.  She has published many articles and a book on collective action and social movements, including her influential work on the "critical mass" with Gerald Marwell, studies of news coverage of protests, and theoretical work on the coevolution of movements, protest and news coverage. Her current NSF-funded project tracks news coverage of Black protests between 1990 and 2010. Between 1999 and 2015, she devoted much of her time to analyzing and speaking about statistical patterns of racial disparity in criminal justice in Wisconsin and the nation. She made over 100 public presentations on these issues and served on the Governor's Commission to Reduce Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice in 2007-8 and the Dane County Task on Racial Disparities 2008-9. The social movements and criminal justice work come together in integrated theories of ethnic conflict, social movements, social control, and repression. For over thirty years, she taught "Ethnic Movements in the US" which compared American Indian, African American, Mexican American, and Asian American movements and politics. She has an active “public sociology” presence through her academic blog Race, Politics, Justice, where she has posted articles on both social movements and imprisonment patterns. 

More about our guest: https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~peoliver/

Colloquia are open to a broader WashU audience; however, space is limited. 
Students who are interested in more advanced sociological inquiry are strongly encouraged to attend.