Department of Sociology

Dr, Jon Gordon is an urban sociologist and ethnographer whose research focuses on violence, crime, and gender in marginalized urban communities. He earned his PhD in Sociology from New York University in 2021. He is currently working on his first book, which follows a criminalized group of men who engaged in violence, operated drug markets, and worked with residents to push forward a vision of change in their community in Medellín, Colombia. In a second project, Jon and colleagues leverage an original dataset to refine a constellation theory of rampage school shootings and advance an analytical approach to rampage attacks, school shootings, and mass shootings. In other projects, Jon and student collaborators examine racial discomfort in undergraduate classrooms and how Mom Influencers and audiences co-construct feminist discourse on TikTok. In his classes, Jon empowers students to see themselves as “producers of knowledge" as they carry out original research and apply sociological concepts to make sense of the challenges faced in their day-to-day lives.

Courses Taught

• SOC 2850: Constructions of Gender
• SOC 3340: Criminology
• SOC 3345: Communities and Crime
• SOC 4450: Senior Capstone

Research Interests

• Community and Urban Sociology
• Crime
• Ethnography
• Gender
• Violence

Recent Publications

Gordon, Jon. 2020. “The Legitimation of Extrajudicial Violence in an Urban Community.” Social Forces, 98(3):1174-95.