Joe Bandy

Joe Bandy is Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching and faculty in the Department of Sociology at Vanderbilt University.  He received his PHD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998, and was Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College from 1998 to 2010, after which he came to Vanderbilt.
From 1996 to 2004, his research investigated the many ways that social movement organizations have responded to the economic changes associated with globalization, especially the efforts of U.S. and Mexican labor and environmental movements to forge coalitions in response to the social problems associated with export processing and free trade.  He was published widely in journals such as Social Problems, Mobilization, Critical Sociology, and Public Culture, and is the co-editor of Coalitions across Borders: Transnational Protest and the Neo-Liberal Order, with Jackie Smith.

In this work, he received support from the National Science Foundation, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the Center for the Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  Since 2005, he has focused on administrative, research, and teaching projects related to faculty development around high impact teaching practices — particularly case- and problem-based methods and service learning — and has championed teaching methods that support  civic engagement, environmental sustainability, and critical understandings of social differences.  He has been featured in Sociologists in Action and is active in his work with Imagining America, an organization dedicated to supporting public scholarship and community engagement in the academy, the Professional and Organizational Development Network, and the Institute of International Education.

At Vanderbilt University, he oversees programs dedicated to these concerns, particularly junior faculty development, service learning and community engagement, sustainability education, and issues of difference and power in teaching.  In sociology, Joe continues to teach in the areas of the sociology of development, globalization, U.S. class relations, labor, as well as environmental problems and movements.