Kristopher K. Robison

Kristopher K. Robison, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology, NIU

Department of Sociology
Northern Illinois University
1425 West Lincoln Highway
DeKalb, IL 60115-2828

E-mail: krob AT niu.edu
Phone: 815-753-6433
Office: Zulauf 820

[Work] [Curriculum Vitae] [Personal]

I am an associate professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University. My sociological imagination is very global, and hence I mostly publish research that studies many nations over time. My prior publications have been focused on the globalization of: terrorism and war, information technology (sometimes framed as the “global digital divide”), money, people, and institutional influences. I’m currently working on manuscripts that discuss the global diffusion of NGO/IGO membership, how conflict influences urban migration patterns in the developing world and how urban growth attracts or generates things like terrorism in turn. To use sociology-speak, this means that I’m interested in macro-social theories of change like World Society/Polity theory, Technoecological theory, Modernization/Dependency theories, Urbanization theories, Civilizational theory, and other related theories that explain why societies around the world are changing and how they change. This also means that I prefer doing quantitative research on the aggregated and emergent behavioral outcomes of individual interpretations/constructions of reality, but I’m not averse to mixed methodologies employing case studies or ethnographies (so long as the point is to do science--building generalizable and cumulative knowledge about social life). I’ve also published on how technology use leads to less enjoyment of the outdoors (like hunting and national park visitation) here in the U.S. Although I have yet to publish in these areas, I have a growing interest in how human biology and evolution shape or interact with our social behavior, and why sociologists largely ignore or sometimes even reject biological forces on society. This means I’m interested in dialoguing with scholars in the growing fields of Evolutionary Psychology/Sociobiology, Behavioral Genetics, Neuroscience, Gene-culture coevolutionary theory and others. I am currently working on a primer to help undergraduate students critically navigate through the insights flowing into social science from these other fields. Other (very nascent) interests include immigration in the suburbs/exurbs as well as exurban (think small cities separated by corn fields twenty minutes outside of major metropolitan areas) culture in general. So, I’m interested in a number of things that sociologists don’t typically study.

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