The American Sociological Association is pleased to welcome Waverly Duck as the newest editor of the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. His term began January 1, 2026.
Duck brings decades of experience in research, service, mentoring, and teaching to his role as editor. As the North Hall Endowed Chair Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, he examines the interaction orders of socially marginalized communities, including the practices they develop to cope with and resist structural inequality, racism, and discrimination. In addition to his service on multiple editorial boards, he has served as associate director for the Center on Black Studies Research at UC-Santa Barbara, with secondary appointments in Black studies and linguistics, and as director of the Urban Studies, Administrative Justice, and Legal Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also co-chaired the Year of Diversity initiative. With his extensive experience, Duck is well-positioned to implement his bold, exciting vision for the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
Duck’s award-winning scholarship situates urban ethnography within an interaction order framework, employing a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and geospatial methods to investigate how racial and ethnic inequality is reproduced across contexts, from institutional settings to everyday interactions. His book No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing
(University of Chicago Press 2015) is an in-depth ethnography of a poor, majority Black neighborhood with an embedded drug market and the interaction order its residents have created to enable dealers and nondealers to coexist with minimal violence. In Tacit Racism, coauthored with Anne Rawls (University of Chicago Press 2020), he demonstrates how racial bias is encoded in many of the mundane expectations and practices that make up day-to-day life, resulting in the perpetuation of racial inequality and hierarchy. He has also published on topics ranging from food apartheid and anti-Black and antisemitic racism to racial disparities in health. Recently, his work has been supported by a Russell Sage Fellowship (2024-2025) and a collaborative, multi-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (2022-2027) focused on the effects of inequality on Black American health.
Editorial Experience and Service to the Discipline
Duck has extensive editorial experience. He has served as an editorial board member of five journals: American Sociological Review, City and Community, Critical Sociology, Sociological Theory, and Sociological Forum. Outside of peer-reviewed journals, he is co-editor, with Anne Rawls and Kevin Whitehead, of the volume Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Racism in Everyday Interaction (Routledge 2020) and has served as a book reviewer for several academic presses, including Duke University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Temple University Press. As an editor, he has prioritized publishing innovative research across theoretical and methodological spectra, including work by young scholars and members of historically underrepresented groups.
Duck has chaired or co-chaired numerous committees both within and outside of ASA, including the Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award Committee (2022-2024), and the Garfinkel-Sacks Award for Distinguished Scholarship Committee for the ASA’s Section on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (2023). Duck is also on the steering committee for the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network (2023-present) and has served on the ASA’s Committee on Committees (2019-2022) and as executive board member-at-large for the Association of Black Sociologists (2019-2022). As associate director for UC-Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies Research, he led interdisciplinary research initiatives on the social, political, and economic experiences of African Diaspora communities and organized international conferences bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
Vision for the Journal
Duck seeks to expand the journal’s reach, scope, engagement, and relevance—both within sociology and across disciplinary boundaries—in an effort to help all scholars of race and ethnicity see themselves in the journal. In addition to recognizing the deeply interdisciplinary character of race scholarship, bringing together scholars whose diverse theoretical and empirical work engages the sociological dimensions of race and ethnicity—whether through the lens of health, education, urban planning, or cultural production—will foster exchanges that enhance the journal’s visibility and impact while advancing its core mission.
Another aim is to ensure that early career scholars know they have a place at the journal. Duck envisions establishing resources to help such scholars navigate all stages of the publishing process, from preparing and submitting manuscripts to responding to reviewer comments, incorporating feedback, and revising their work into a publishable piece. To that end, the journal will leverage Section-approved social media platforms to enable early career researchers to learn from and connect with senior scholars and develop workshops to teach best-practices.
Finally, Duck envisions expanding the journal’s regional, national, and international footprint. This includes engaging with regional sociological associations across the country whose members are producing important work, as well as transnational scholarly networks in Europe, Britain, Canada, and South Africa. At a critical moment in American and global history, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity will continue to offer theoretically informed, empirically rigorous work that speaks to some of the central challenges and opportunities of our time.