Walter Carroll

Dr. Carroll is an urban sociologist with expertise in race, ethnicity, and diversity; urban political economy; guns and urban violence; social network analysis; Japanese cities; and urban problems and policy. Uniting the strands of his work is a focus on urban inequality and a concern for urban social justice. Most recently he has examined the factors that increase vulnerability to and hinder recovery from urban disasters. His course, Urban Disasters and Resilient Cities, reflects that work.

He has also written extensively on gun violence, having contributed many entries to and served on the editorial board of Guns in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (2002), edited by Gregg Lee Carter. He wrote an article on the Second Amendment forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of the United States Constitution, and contributed pieces on W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Law Olmsted, deindustrialization, guns in cities, and the Internet and cities to the Encyclopedia of American Urban History(2007).

Dr. Carroll is professor of sociology at Bridgewater State College, where he created a concentration in City, Community, and Region (CCR) within the sociology major. In that program, which focuses on Brockton and other southeastern Massachusetts cities, he teaches courses in urban sociology, urban planning, urban crime, cities in global context, and urban disasters.

Dr. Carroll did his dissertation on nineteenth-century New Bedford, wrote Brockton: from Rural Parish to Urban Center (1989), and co-authored Social Problems: Causes, Consequences, Interventions (2000). At Boston University, he has taught courses in urban disasters, urban problems and policy, race and urban affairs, urban planning, and quantitative data analysis in urban research. His current research focuses on the network structure of gun-related associations on the web and he has started a project on the role of the arts and cultural institutions in urban revitalization.