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The Social Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz is a community of changemakers working to address some of the biggest, most complex social and environmental challenges of our time.

The interdisciplinary Legal Studies Program explores how laws are made and enforced, the philosophical and moral questions behind them, and how laws impact our daily lives.

Teaching effective techniques and strategies for community organizing and social movement work.

In a time of rapid global change and growing inequality, we pause to ask tough questions about where society is headed and why.

Our work uncovers ways to advance social justice, produces useful innovations that improve our daily lives, and demonstrates the strengths that arise from diversity in human experience.

We seek to prepare our students with knowledge and skills that are valuable for a wide range of careers and for reflective and active citizenship in contemporary democracy.

We focus on issues like migration and mobilities, inequality, identities, intersectionality, race, ethnicity, social and political transitions, culture, power, and knowledge, to uncover the deep interconnectedness of peoples and regions across the Américas. 

In the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, we see environmental problems as human problems, with societal causes, impacts, and solutions. 

We’re preparing our state’s next generation of teachers, educational leaders, and researchers to improve educational opportunities for historically marginalized students.

We use economic tools to study important topics and to inform policy. We are proud to educate the next generation of students through our undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. programs.

 We study people and human diversity, from the dawn of our species to the present moment. Our work explores human nature, in terms of both our innate biological aspects and our socially constructed cultures.