We are pleased to introduce you to the distinguished winners of ASA’s 2022 awards. The winners will be honored in a ceremony during the Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. Each of the pieces below was submitted by the relevant award selection committee, and we thank the committees for their good work.
Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award
Amanda Lewis, University of Illinois – Chicago
Amanda Lewis is LAS Distinguished Professor and Director of Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, Sociology & African American Studies, University of Illinois – Chicago. The award committee unanimously voted for Lewis to receive this award. In a letter of support to the committee, a scholar enthusiastically advocated for Lewis: “Never one to privilege her own interests above the collective good, Professor Lewis is an ideal candidate for the American Sociological Association’s Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award that is given annually to a person whose work reflects the intellectual traditions of Oliver Cox, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier and a long-standing commitment to social justice.” Furthermore, a committee member noted, “Lewis’ record is solid and as the Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP), she is well suited for this award. IRRPP is centered on the very criteria for this award: scholarship that serves the public good, works toward social justice, and is for the betterment of disadvantaged populations.”
Lewis has demonstrated an academic career and service that is well-deserving of the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award. Her illustrious academic career demonstrates a commitment to interrogating the interrelationships between racial inequality, socialization, and education with the purpose of securing rights and opportunities necessary for all people to flourish with their dignity intact. Lewis is a highly prolific and engaged scholar whose work has a wide reach. She has published three books, one edited book, 25 journal articles, 25 book chapters, as well as other types of publications. Lewis’ first book, Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities, received the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and the American Education Studies Association Critic’s Choice Award. Lewis’ book, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, co-authored with John Diamond, received the Society for the Study of Social Problem’s Race and Ethnic Minority Section’s Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award.
Within the discipline, Lewis has served on committees for ASA’s Sections on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, Education, and Children and Youth as well as the Society for the Study of Social Problems in general. Within the community, Lewis developed a partnership with the Chicago Community Trust to fund community-based projects aimed at achieving a more racially just city.
Lewis’ body of work has impacted race, education, urban schools, social inequality, and ethnography. Her scholarship has an applied and public policy emphasis. She collaborates with educators, school administrators, policy makers, and anti-racist individuals and organizations. For example, one letter of support highlighted Lewis’ commitment to the community by noting: “Lewis has leveraged her research expertise to advance attention to issues of educational racial inequality. One of the most applied ways in which Lewis has done this is by organizing an IRRPP Summer Education Workshop, which is a four-day workshop for K-12 teachers interested in advancing racial justice in their classrooms and schools. Some of these workshops have focused on topics such as: Developing Youth as Engaged Citizens and Race, Identity and Classrooms. It is also no surprise that Lewis is often sought by educators in the Chicago area, as well as nationally, to serve as a consultant in their attempts to address racial inequality and promote racial justice in their schools.”
Lewis’ scholarship and public sociology is meaningful and prolific toward the aims of the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award: to pay tribute to sociologists who successfully undertake institutional change to empower marginalized people.
Adia Harvey Wingfield, Washington University – St. Louis
Adia Harvey Wingfield is Vice Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity, Professor of Sociology, and Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis. She represents the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award which pays tribute to sociologists who successfully undertake institutional change to empower marginalized people.
Wingfield has produced extensive scholarship on the African American population. One letter of support for this award noted, “Wingfield is the country’s leading scholar on Black workers. Wingfield has developed a theory of ‘racialized tasks’ that explains how organizations structure opportunities for African American professionals. Wingfield has published research that documents these challenges in multiple books (Flatlining, No More Invisible Man, and Doing Business with Beauty) and articles in numerous journals (American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, American Behavioral Scientist, Social Problems, and Ethnic and Racial Studies). Wingfield’s most recent book develops a unique understanding of the intersectional dynamics experienced by Black hospital workers in a period of declining support for public institutions. By comparing the discrimination experienced by doctors, nurses, and orderlies at U.S. hospitals, Wingfield reimagines how workplace organizations can be reconfigured to better reflect the needs of a changing work force.”
Wingfield has also built, developed, and sustained various institutions and programs. Again, drawing from a letter of support, “Wingfield uses this knowledge and body of scholarship to implement changes to create more equitable workplaces. Wingfield is piloting a program to create more racial equality in health care with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She serves as an Advisory Board Member for the Los Angeles Lakers’ Oral History and Social Justice Project, in an effort to help the organization transition to an actively antiracist one. Wingfield showcased the scholarship of Black women in the role as president of Sociologists for Women in Society and the Southern Sociological Society. Wingfield played a leadership role in founding the new department of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis in the sociological tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois.”
There was overwhelming support for Wingfield to receive the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award. For example, in the nomination packet scholars noted, “I cannot imagine more enthusiastically supporting a nomination that I do here” and “Adia Harvey Wingfield is an exceptional sociologist and institution builder who has promoted social justice for African Americans throughout her distinguished career.” Peers go on to proclaim, “Wingfield represents the legacy and the ideals of sociologists Cox, Johnson, and Frazier. Through extensive efforts, Wingfield has transformed the discipline and the world of work to promote social justice for African American people.”
The committee unanimously voted for Adia Harvey Wingfield to receive the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award. One board member summed up the collective sentiments of the committee: “Wingfield’s contributions go beyond academia and is aligned with the spirit of this award.”
Dissertation Award
Ricarda Hammer, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, for “Citizenship and Colonial Difference: The Racial Politics of Rights and Rule Across the Black Atlantic,” completed at Brown University
Ricarda Hammer is the recipient of the 2022 ASA Dissertation Award for “Citizenship and Colonial Difference: The Racial Politics of Rights and Rule Across the Black Atlantic,” which reveals how modern understandings of citizenship and rights are embedded in colonial structures and the racial classification systems the create. Focusing on the Caribbean and using innovative archival methods, Hammer examines how British and French empires constructed their colonial subjects—how they decided who counts as human and how those decisions racialized conceptions of citizenship and rights. Going a step further, Hammer considers how the people of the Caribbean resisted colonization and enslavement and shows how their struggles for freedom—and their efforts to offer their own conceptions of rights and citizenship—are central to the history of democratization.
Theoretically and methodologically, Hammer’s dissertation lays the groundwork for a postcolonial historical sociology and a contemporary global Du Boisian sociology. Bridging the work done by Julian Go and W. E. B. Du Bois, Hammer offers a richly empirical account of how British and French liberal politics enabled the racialization of rights. The chapters move through four case studies/conjunctures that approach the question of freedom for the colonized, including the Haitian Revolution, the abolition of slavery in colonial Jamaica, the unequal inclusion of Martinican citizens in France, and the transformation of British colonial subjects into “immigrants.” Taken together, these key moments offer an alternative genealogy of citizenship rights—one rooted in empires rather than nation states.
Committee members were deeply impressed by the sheer ambition of Hammer’s project and by her chutzpah in speaking not merely to specific subfields of sociology but to the discipline as a whole. In Chapter 7, for example, Hammer encourages us all to recognize and rethink the role that sociology has played in shaping modern understandings of race, rights, and citizenship. She shows how, amidst the dissolution of the British empire, sociologists and anthropologists helped construct the formerly colonized people of the West Indies as foreign racialized others. Those distinctions disrupted opportunities for geographic and social mobility by eroding the rights formerly granted to subjects of the empire (i.e., to move to the “mother country” if they desired) and establishing assimilation as the responsibility of people who, by their own understanding, were migrating “home.” Methodologically, Hammer encourages sociologists to think beyond the bounds of modern nation states and to see contemporary political and social structures as the product of colonial forces and the empires in which and across these forces were exercised.
Committee members also praised Hammer for the clarity of her theoretical models, the quality of her writing, and the broad applicability of her insights. One committee member called the work “impressive” and “brilliant,” explaining that “this dissertation is a good demonstration of why and how sociology is valuable and important for the study of history, which in turn informs our understanding of the present.” Another committee member noted: “If this is turned into a book, I see it as a work that would be widely cited and taught.” And a third remarked that, while reading Hammer’s dissertation, she simply couldn’t put it down.
Hammer’s dissertation research was supported, by in part, by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Improvement Award. She received her PhD in Sociology from Brown University in 2021, and she is currently a WCED Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.
Lacee A. Satcher, Boston College, for “(Un) Just Deserts: Examining the Consequences of Economic, Social, and Environmental Disinvestment in the Urban South,” completed at Vanderbilt University
Lacee A. Satcher is the recipient of the 2022 ASA Dissertation Award for “(Un)Just Deserts: Examining the Consequences of Economic, Social, and Environmental Disinvestment in the Urban South,” which reveals how systemic racism and economic marginalization create what she calls multiply-deserted areas—communities that have limited access not only to one type of social, economic, or health-related resource but to multiple types of resources simultaneously (e.g., food sources, pharmacies, and greenspace). Satcher finds that the co-occurrence of resource deprivation occurs disproportionately in Black neighborhoods, regardless of residents’ income. Going a step further, she also finds that residents of these communities experience worse health outcomes—with higher rates of obesity, asthma, and diabetes—than do residents of communities that experience resource deprivation in only one domain.
Committee members were impressed with the methodological breadth and rigor of Satcher’s multi-method dissertation. Satcher built her own dataset of census tract-level spatial data, combining and coding data from multiple databases, websites, and health agencies for thousands of census tracts across 17 southern states. She also conducted in-depth interviews with residents of public housing in one multiply-deserted area in her database (with limited access to food sources, pharmacies, and greenspace), with the goal of understanding how the experience of multiple deprivation affected residents’ sense of attachment to place. Methodologically, Satcher’s dissertation expands the research on resource deprivation beyond northeastern communities, where it has traditionally been studied. It also highlights the importance of studying resource deprivation and its consequences as a spectrum, rather than assuming that single factors operate in isolation and impact all those affected by them in similar ways.
Theoretically, Satcher’s dissertation contributes to research on environmental justice, systemic racism, economic marginalization, urban sociology, and medical sociology, as well. Drawing insights from social psychology, Satcher argues that multiply-deserted areas contribute to health disparities by compounding exposure to stress. Satcher’s in-depth interviews provide further evidence for such arguments, revealing that living in a multiply-deserted area does not prevent residents from accessing food, pharmacies, and greenspace, but that it does make the process of accessing those resources difficult and time-consuming, particularly for residents who do not have access to their own vehicle. Moreover, and because of the added difficulty involved in accessing resources, the co-occurrence of resource deprivation also leads residents of multiply-deserted areas to rely on lower-quantity and lower-quality resources. The pharmacies they can access, for example, run out of medicines more frequently, because they serve not only the communities in which they are located but also surrounding communities without pharmacies of their own.
Committee members were impressed with the theoretical contributions that Satcher makes in her dissertation. As one committee member noted: “This is a fascinating study that takes an environment justice approach to resource scarcity in predominantly Black neighborhoods.” Another committee member expressed appreciation for the clarity of research questions and hypotheses and for Satcher’s efforts to engage multiple theories to explain what she found, saying: “The triangulation of medical sociology, environmental sociology, and urban sociology creates a powerful lens for examining racism and racial inequalities.” Other committee members also praised Satcher for her careful interpretation of in-depth interview data, even when it did not confirm the patterns she expected to find.
Satcher’s dissertation research was supported, in part, by a NASEM/Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. She received her PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2021, and she is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Boston College.
Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology
Nicol Turner Lee, Brookings Institution
Nicol Turner Lee is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies and Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. She is an expert in the intersection of race, wealth and technology within the context of civic engagement, criminal justice, and economic development. Turner Lee is a nationally recognized leader in technology innovation, the digital divide, and ways to advance marginalized populations. Her work also explores global and domestic broadband deployment and internet governance issues.
At Brookings, Turner Lee serves as co-editor of the TechTank blog and TechTank podcast. The blog reaches about a million people a year and the podcast has nearly 50,000 listeners since it launched a year ago. On these platforms, she covers technology policy and reaches an audience of policymakers, journalists, academics, and foreign officials interested in all things digital. As part of this public outreach, she compiles data, incorporates the insights of academic literature, and looks at ways to improve the policy, legal, and regulatory response to tech problems. She has a new book coming out entitled the Digitally Invisible, which looks at those who are outside the tech revolution and excluded from applying for jobs online, gaining the benefits of online education, using telemedicine, working remotely, and participating in the digital part of civil society.
Prior to joining the Brookings Institute, Turner Lee was at the Multicultural Medica, Telecom and Internet Council, a national nonprofit organization dedicate to promoting and preserving equal opportunity and civil rights in the mass medica, telecommunication, and broadband industries, where she served as vice president and chief research and policy officer. In this role, she led the design and implementation of their research, policy, and advocacy agendas.
Turner Lee has been cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and other major publications. She has been seen or heard on NPR, NBC News, ABC, and various online publications. She is a widely sought expert and speaker on topics related to communication policies in media. She has testified on multiple occasions before Congress.
Turner Lee meets all award criteria. She serves as a model for others. Through her work she elevates the professional status of sociology. Her work has a significant impact while advancing human welfare.
Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at Brookings, describes her colleague in the following manner: “Nicol is a successful role model who has worked well with colleagues at Brookings, scholars in the academy, and young, aspiring talent. Speaking at the personal level, I admire Nicol’s energy and speaking ability. It is no overstatement to say Nicol is one of the most skilled public speakers I have met, either during my 26 years teaching at Brown University or 13 years working in a DC-based think tank. She is much in demand and has given hundreds of well-received speeches around the United States and the world. She is skilled at developing creative new ideas and presenting them to people who are in a position to make policy change.”
Turner Lee is a graduate of Colgate University. She earned her MA and PhD in sociology from Northwestern University.
Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award
Melinda Messineo, Ball State University
Melinda Messineo is Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. Her curriculum vitae and letters of recommendation outline the epitome of a career of distinguished contributions to the teaching and learning of sociology at the university, regional, national, and international levels.
At Ball State, Messineo has been recognized for her contributions and leadership in the first-year experience programs, immersive learning programs, accessibility in teaching, interactive classroom design, introducing green initiatives, diversity policy, and core curriculum revision. Messineo has received several awards, including the Accessible Teacher of the Year award in 2011. Ball State nominated her as the institution’s candidate for the U.S. Professor of the Year award in both 2009 and 2013.
At the regional level, Messineo has made numerous contributions to teaching and learning. In addition to receiving the NCSA John Schnabel Distinguished Contributions to Teaching award in 2015, Messineo headed the organization’s committee on teaching and learning from 2010 to 2013. In that role, Messineo took responsibility for numerous sessions on teaching and learning, recruiting session organizers, and coordinating the selection of the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching award each year. Her presidential address highlighted the art of story-telling and sociological listening in teaching and learning.
An overview of Messineo’s leadership at the national level in teaching and learning is lengthy and noteworthy. In addition to serving as the university representative on the council for the section on teaching and learning, and as the section’s secretary-treasurer, Messineo was elected as chair of the ASA Section on Teaching and Learning. Over the years, Messineo has presented numerous papers on scholarship of teaching and learning and given a number of teaching workshops at the ASA Annual Meeting. Moreover, Messineo served as the organizer of the ASA Preconference on Teaching and Learning for six years. The preconference is a full day of teaching and learning workshops and presentations catering to the development of graduate students and new faculty. Organizing the preconference for one year is huge, taking the reins for six years is a Herculean task and a tremendous service to the ASA.
Additionally, Messineo’s efforts have gone beyond national borders. She has been active in the International Society for Teaching and Learning and served as chair of its Sociology Special Interest Group from 2010 to 2012. She has been a member of the editorial board of the organization’s journal since 2012.
As a teaching and learning scholar, Messineo has tackled some of our most challenging issues in contemporary higher education. She presented and published on topics of universal design, inclusive pedagogy, active learning strategies in large classrooms, service learning, student learning and assessment, the science of learning and the status of the sociology major and minor in the emerging climate in higher education, to name a few. In addition, she has aided in the development of the teaching and learning scholarship of others by serving on the editorial boards of Teaching Sociology, The Journal of Instructional Research, and Teaching and Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal.
In sum, Messineo has worked tirelessly at the local, regional, national, and international levels toward helping all of us to become more thoughtful, reflective, innovative, inclusive, caring, and successful teachers of sociology. The award committee is honored to present her the award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Sociology in recognition of an impactful career.
Karen Sternheimer, University of Southern California
Karen Sternheimer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She is being recognized for an individual project of outstanding impact on the teaching and learning of sociology. Sternheimer is the creator and founding editor of the Everyday Sociology blog and has served in this capacity since 2007.
To provide evidence of the blog’s reach, we turn to the site’s data analytics. According to the publisher, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., the average number of blog page views is nearly 1,800 per day. This figure includes views from the general public, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as sociology teachers throughout the world. Over the 14 years of the existence of the blog, 9.5 million viewers have visited the site.
Sternheimer’s goal for the blog is to increase the accessibility of sociology by focusing on everyday occurrences as well as current events. Authors focus on a mundane topic or a critical social event, but all authors apply sociological concepts and/or theories to their topics. Recently the blog featured a number of posts about the pandemic and the effects of racism, housing, varying work characteristics of blue-collar and white-collar occupations, economic inequality, and more on disease exposure and access to healthcare.
In addition to writing her own posts, Sternheimer has recruited over a dozen regular contributors who represent different substantive areas as well as varying institutions and geographic locations. Readers are able to post comments. Additionally, Sternheimer has created a method for directly engaging student perspectives and interests through an “Ask a Sociologist” feature that seeks reader’s requests. She has also included blogs written by undergraduate and graduate students in an effort to inspire other students to try their hand at sociological writing.
During a period of rising textbook costs, the fact that Everyday Sociology is free makes it possible for poorly resourced faculty at all levels of academia to incorporate it into their sociology classes. In addition to the blogs themselves, Sternheimer and others have developed quizzes for faculty use.
The blog is widely utilized by teachers of sociology at the high school, community college, four-year college, and university levels. Several members of the award committee indicated that they use the blog regularly in their own teaching. In sum, the Everyday Sociology blog, created and edited by Sternheimer, has made a significant contribution to the teaching and learning of our discipline.
Distinguished Scholarly Book Award
Armando Lara-Millán, University of California–Berkeley, for Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Lara-Millán is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at University of California at Berkeley. Based on a study of the institutional practices of the Los Angeles County jail and a Los Angeles-based public hospital, Redistributing the Poor effectively maps out and analyzes the inter-linked shifts in the functioning of state institutions. In his book, Lara-Millán argues that opioid distribution became the way to stabilize patients while also subjecting them to criminalization as they increasingly relied upon more opioids to appease their suffering. This was exacerbated by an increased presence of police in the public hospital emergency room, who criminalize indigent people for, quite literally, waiting for access to more opioids. By drawing upon this empirical case, the analysis unravels how municipal governmental agencies prevent a crisis from emerging when public demands concerning health care emerge in the midst of diminishing public resources made available to meet those demands. As Lara-Millán argues, the so-called redistribution of the poor across institutional spheres (from the hospital/health care to the police/incarceration) is the means of averting such a crisis. Consequently, a social dilemma is made obscure rather than solved.
Lara-Millán commits to extensive archival analysis to investigate how selected agencies of the state, which confront the challenges of legal accountability and fiscal austerity, encourage civil servants and other governmental agents to distribute their resources in ways that both indict people while disguising the mechanisms by which this occurs. Essentially, federal, state, and local institutions redistribute and reclassify the poor as underserving in ways that he portrays as a process of “administrative disappearance.” In making his case, Lara-Millán challenges the capacity of various standing approaches to crime and poverty—those focused on hyper- criminalization, deinstitutionalization, mass incarceration, and other approaches—to explain the paradoxical phenomenon of jails adopting medical practices while hospitals become sites for policing.
Redistributing the Poor is both breathtaking and path breaking. It combines rich empirical documentation, daring theoretical vision with methodological innovation to generate novel insights into the connection between medical and criminological research. Empirically, the work explores and dissects how different levels of the state—federal, state and local—operate through collaboration and conflict to reclassify and redistribute the poor. Theoretically, it provides original interpretation of state functioning in the midst of public calls for accountability and austerity. Methodologically, it provocatively blends ethnographic with historical research. Finally, in speaking back to municipal policy, the work addresses how municipal politics and policies disguise rather than solve vexing social problems. Taking all of this into account, Redistributing the Poor establishes the possibilities for social organizational sociologists, political sociologists, urban studies scholars, and policy scholars to research and document more substantively how inter-institutional agency in municipalities play direct and indirect roles in regulating the urban poor. Thus, it is a work that extends beyond its empirical domain to advance sociological inquiry in essential and critical ways.
The committee also acknowledges two books designated this year as Honorable Mentions:
- Poulami Roychowdhury, McGill University, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India (Oxford University Press, 2021)
- Jeff Hass, University of Richmond, Wartime Suffering and Survival (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Each book was regarded by the committee as reflecting sophisticated approaches to the cultural-theoretical analysis of agency within structural constraints such that more complex portraits of human will emerged.
Jessie Bernard Award
Marlese Durr, Wright State University
Marlese Durr is a Professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Wright State University. Durr is the recipient of this year’s Jessie Bernard Award, which recognizes a scholar who has dedicated their career to enlarging “the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.” And Durr’s work truly encompasses the tenets of the award, which highlight a feminist approach to the many aspects of a scholar’s work, including service, mentoring, and teaching, in addition to research.
Many of you likely know Durr from her leadership work across sociology and feminist organizations, and as a “tireless advocate for women scholars and gender scholars.” Indeed, the wonderful academics who nominated Durr note her incredible influence on the field as both a researcher and a mentor. For example, letter writer Mignon Moore notes that Durr has worked to “make ASA a more welcoming place for women scholars, and scholars of color, and researchers studying the intersections of gender and other statuses.” This is no small feat, and this sort of work needs to be more often recognized; after all, what is our job as feminist academics if it is not to pave a smoother path for marginalized scholars?
The award committee was impressed with the support Durr provides to junior scholars, helping them to promote their work, connecting them with powerful people within the discipline, and trading on her institutional memory to mentor them into leadership roles. Indeed, Durr does “pioneering” work to “promote and develop” inclusive spaces, with Josephine Beoku-Betts pointing to Durr’s work as a “founding member of the [SWS] Sister-to-Sister Committee, which was designed to ensure that marginalized scholars could access spaces in the organization and in the discipline that would further their stature in scholarship and positions in leadership.” Durr has also served as President of both the Society for the Study of Social Problems and Sociologists for Women in Society, and has held numerous leadership positions at ASA.
“Highly-respected” amongst her colleagues, Durr publishes “steadily and extensively” on intersectional inequities, centering race in the study of women’s experiences with work, health, and criminalization. In his letter of support, Johnny Williams describes Durr’s research as teasing out the “relationship between race/racism, gender, and class” and centering “critical racism” in gender scholarship “before it became popular.” David Embrick, who led Durr’s nomination for the award, describes one of her publications this way:
[I]n her well-cited Gender & Society publication, “Sex, Drugs, and HIV: Sisters of the Laundromat,” Marlese points to the laundromat as a unique (but one of many) places in which women, but particularly poor and working class women and women of color, help to keep one another informed about various information and topics as well as keep an eye on one another, particularly on issues of drugs, sex, and disease.
This is an example of how Durr’s scholarship expands our understandings of how particularly marginalized women attempt collectively to make up for the lack of institutional support to mitigate the harmful effects of poverty and racism.
All the letters of support we received on behalf of Durr applaud her consistent and unwavering dedication to pathbreaking scholarship and mentorship while carrying a 4-4 teaching load at Wright State University. As this award committee increasingly takes a holistic approach to what counts as supporting women, and other marginalized people, in sociology, it is important to note that Durr’s feminist work buoyed the field not despite her heavy teaching load but through what Bhoomi Thakore describes as her feminist teaching, whereby Durr helps students to “deal with first time or even typical student anxieties, imposter syndromes, or just helping them to find their place in academia. She makes us feel welcome, supported, and important.”
For these reasons and more, please join me in celebrating Marlese Durr, this year’s recipient of the Jessie Bernard Award.
Public Understanding of Sociology Award
Julie Dowling, University of Illinois-Chicago
Julie Dowling is Associate Professor of Sociology & Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Dowling was selected for this recognition because of her extensive efforts to translate her sociological research and expertise into strategies to ensure an accurate and inclusive count of the U.S. population on the 2020 Census. Dowling made major contributions to Census efforts to redesign how race is measured on the Census. As a member and later Chair of the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations, Dowling also made major contributions to ensuring that Census methodology maximized the inclusion of hard-to-count and marginalized populations, such as unhoused, low-income, LGBTQ, linguistic minority, rural, Native American, and immigrant populations. As Chair, Dowling also had to guide the 2020 Census through the challenges of the pandemic and the concurrent socio-political context. The importance of this work cannot be overstated since undercounts of vulnerable, marginalized, or racialized families can result in a devastating loss of federal and state funding as well as political representation for a full decade.
In addition to her work with the U.S. Census Bureau, the award selection committee was impressed by Dowling’s substantial contributions to national, state, and local conversations about the 2020 Census. Dowling educated legislators, political groups, non-profits, and community organizations—from her own community to Capitol Hill—on issues relating to the 2020 Census. Beyond her work with the Census, Dowling has also helped to reframe public dialogue regarding racial identity in the Latino community through her research and through media appearances in venues such as the New York Times and Washington Post.
Dowling’s work with the Census Bureau is grounded in her impressive sociological research on racial classification, exemplified by her 2014 book, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race. In the book, Dowling examines how Latinos make decisions regarding their racial identification on the U.S. Census. Her analysis revealed a process that she termed a “racial ideology continuum,” where Latinos’ racial identities are connected to how they process and articulate discrimination. Those who identified as “White” on the census often did not label themselves White in their daily lives, but calculated this response on the Census in an effort to assert an “American” identity to the U.S. government in the face of racialized discrimination. This was a critical finding, as much prior research had assumed that racial identification as “White” on the census reflected skin color or assimilation. Her book was incredibly well received in the field, earning an Honorable Mention for the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.
Dowling’s future work seems just as promising in its public impact. She is currently working on a collaborative project funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation that examines Latino perceptions of government, including how they feel about the current political climate, their political representation, and their trust in federal, state, and local governments.
Dowling manages to conduct outstanding research and maintain a first-rate public engagement profile, while also taking time to mentor and support emerging scholars, at her home institution and beyond.
W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award
Mary Romero, Arizona State University
Mary Romero is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University and affiliate of Women and Gender Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies and African and African American Studies. She was elected as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association and previously served as ASA Secretary from 2014-2016.
If there is growing recognition in sociology today that modern societies often rest on a bed of racialized and gendered class exploitation, this owes in no small part to the pathbreaking work of Romero. One of the leading figures in intersectional, feminist research, Romero has made major contributions to the study of carework, immigration, family, social exclusion, identity, belonging, mobility, entrepreneurship, and law. Her 1992 book, Maid in the U.S.A., offered a now classic analysis of how the career advancement of professional-class white women (and men) may hinge upon the underpaid labor of women of color who toil in their households as domestic workers. But the book also set a research agenda that Romero would vigorously pursue for the next three decades.
In subsequent and equally celebrated book chapters, articles, and edited volumes—and in her methodologically innovative 2011 monograph, The Maid’s Daughter, a rare long-term oral history project—Romero went on to identify and unpack the complex ways in which overlapping systems of power and inequality shape experiences of social marginality, as well as the creative strategies people deploy to resist in the interests of their families, their communities, and their dignity. She has also been on the forefront—across levels of analysis—of dynamics of social invisibility that go hand in hand with exploitation; and countered those dynamics by spotlighting the lives, relationships, and practices of working-class Latino/a Americans in particular, in all their diversity, who have for far too long been kept in the shadows. For sociologists in a wide array of subfields, Romero’s research is foundational.
While her intellectual contributions are many, the award committee was also deeply impressed by what Romero has managed to accomplish for the discipline organizationally. Just as American society has often rendered the experiences of working-class Latino/a Americans invisible, so too has sociology proceeded with certain blinders. As part of this, the discipline hasn’t always been a hospitable place for Latino/a scholars, or for other scholars at the margins. Romero has worked tirelessly to change this. She was a founding member of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Latino/a Sociology and the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. As ASA President, she pushed for greater inclusivity, and made the case that in light of current social and political crises, the time was at hand to revive a tradition of engaged, social justice-oriented scholarship of the kind practiced by W.E.B. Du Bois and his Atlanta School colleagues, and by “settlement house” thinkers and researchers like Jane Addams. Romero has been similarly influential in opening up new horizons and opportunities in organizations like Sociologists for Women in Society. And she has served as a mentor to countless early-career sociologists who might not otherwise have felt that they belonged in a discipline that could seem, as Romero put it in the title of a 1998 article coauthored with Eric Margolis, “very old, very white, and very conservative.”
The W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award is for those “who have shown outstanding commitment to the profession of sociology and whose cumulative work has contributed in important ways to the advancement of the discipline.” Mary Romero embodies that commitment, and her work has made just such a lasting contribution.
