“For us, it provided the opportunity to show how sociology is applicable in lots of different ways,” Pippert said in an about the group’s experience. “So I asked [the students] to think about this trip and the experience in the museum, as how does their sociological training inform what they witnessed? How did the theories that they’ve read about, how does that play out in the symbolic representation of a horrific tragedy? How do you choose to tell that story? And what are the symbols that are used to tell that story?”

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Douglas Hartmann (PhD University of California, San Diego, 1997) is professor and associate chair of sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (University of Chicago Press), and recently published an expanded second edition of Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Pine Forge Press, with Stephen Cornell). Hartmann is co-principal investigator of the American Mosaic Project, an ongoing, multi-method study of race, religion, and diversity in the contemporary U.S. funded by the Twin Cities-based Edelstein Family Foundation.

Hartmann’s work and comments on race, popular culture, religion, and multiculturalism have been featured in Time magazine, newspapers around the country, and on both Minnesota and National Public Radio. Hartmann is also co-editor (with Christopher Uggen) of Contexts, the American Sociological Association’s publication that brings sociology to broader public influence and attention.

Professor Hartmann received the Midwest Sociological Society’s Early Career Scholarship Award in 2008.

About Joel Torstenson ’38

Joel Torstenson was instrumental in founding the Department of Sociology at Augsburg College in 1947. Joel retired from Augsburg after 35 years of service, during which time he also helped found Augsburg’s Metro-Urban Studies program, the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA), and the Department of Social Work. He remained actively connected to the Sociology Department until his death in October 2007.

As a way to celebrate the life-work of Torstenson, the Torstenson Lecture in Sociology promotes the field of sociology and Augsburg’s contribution to the field through the sharing and exchange of ideas between the Augsburg community and invited guest lecturers.

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