About Us

Ever since its emergence in the 19th century, sociology has sought to understand social order and the structure of rapidly experienced social change on both national and global levels. Its pioneers have intended to bring a scientific structure to thinking about society, and aimed to differentiate sociology from other sciences and disciplines.

Today, sociology has moved beyond the boundaries drawn by its founders and takes all aspects of social life as its object of study. Sociology examines at the micro level the taken for granted actions and habits of everyday life along with issues at the macro level such as gender, ethnicity, religion, law, education, and health. In brief, anything that is related to social life can be the subject matter of sociology. Sociology, in this sense, forms the foundation of other social sciences, as political, cultural and economic relations are all built on social relations, and are meaningful when they are thought in relation to society.

Sociologists do not only produce academic knowledge about society, but in producing such knowledge they also guide policy makers and those who think about how societies ought to be. The knowledge produced by sociologists show that social rules, cultural norms and inequality, which people take for granted and therefore assume as unchangeable, are actually the products of specific social, political and historical processes, and therefore not inevitable. In other words, by problematizing the common sense conventions and taken for grantedness of society, sociology shows us that different worlds and different social relations are possible. In that sense, the purpose of sociology is not only to understand and explain the social world, but also to imagine ways and solutions for building a more humane future for all of us.

At TEDU Sociology department, we aim to train individuals with such an imagination, who can think critically, understand the nature, structure, and dynamics of social life on local and global levels, transpose universal knowledge to Turkey’s unique conditions, and apply this knowledge to different career paths. As a young department, we possess the adequate competence, determination and dynamism required to pass on to our students the skills and knowledge they will need to make sense of the complex social problems of our ever-changing world.