- ASA 2025 Annual Meeting Updates
- 2025 ASA Elections Open April 16
- Introducing Adia Harvey Wingfield, the 2025 ASA President
- New Editors of ASA Journals
- Spotlight on the Annual Meeting Location: The City at 100: A Volume and its Afterlives
- In Remembrance: Michael Burawoy
- Advocacy Update!
- Is Your Research Federally Funded?
- Expand the Public Understanding of Sociology
- Join ASA on Bluesky Social Media Network
ASA 2025 Annual Meeting Updates
- Register today for the 120th ASA Annual Meeting in Chicago, August 8–12, 2025. Read meeting registration rates and policies here.
- Visit the ASA Annual Meeting page to learn more about past, present and future annual meetings.
2025 ASA Elections Open April 16
The 2025 ASA elections will open Wednesday, April 16, and close Monday, May 19, 5 p.m. Eastern. Ballots will be sent out via email from [email protected]. Please add this email address to the permitted sender’s list on your spam filter to ensure the timely delivery of your ballot.
To vote in the elections, membership must be current from April 1–June 1, 2025. Affiliate members are ineligible to vote in the ASA elections. If your ASA membership expires between April 1 and June 1, 2025, please renew it by March 31 to be eligible to vote in this year’s elections. If you renew your membership before it expires, 365 days of membership will be added to your current expiration date.
Visit the ASA elections page to see the full ballot for ASA-wide positions. If you have questions regarding the elections, contact Mark Fernando.
Introducing Adia Harvey Wingfield, the 2025 ASA President
Adia Harvey Wingfield is the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Sociology and the co-director of the Program of Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a remarkable individual and scholar who knows how to make the most of every moment. Since she began her career as an assistant professor, she has written seven books, served as president of both the Southern Sociological Association and Sociologists for Women in Society, written a plethora of op-eds and articles for popular media outlets, received numerous awards for her scholarship, and has helped reestablish a sociology program. Remarking on Wingfield’s research contributions, University of Texas sociologist Christine Williams shares, “No other sociologist has done more to bring an intersectional perspective to the study of work.”
Establishing the Agenda
Wingfield, whose research focuses on intersectional racial and gender inequalities in professional occupations, completed her undergraduate studies at the prestigious HBCU (historically Black college and university) Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. After graduating, she attended Johns Hopkins University and received her PhD in sociology. Her work at Johns Hopkins led to the publication of her first book, Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy (Rowman & Littlefield 2008). In the book, she relies on interviews and ethnographic data to examine one of the fastest-growing groups of entrepreneurs—Black women. In talking to us about the importance of the book, her friend and colleague, Rutgers University sociologist Enobong (Anna) Branch, shares, “Wingfield demonstrated how Black women utilized the lucrative racial enclave economy to gain autonomy and financial security, contested traditional models of entrepreneurship through alternative sources of financing, and created a counter-frame to Eurocentric norms that uphold the beauty of Black women.”
After obtaining her PhD, Wingfield worked as an assistant professor of sociology at Hollins University from 2004 to 2006. In 2006, she joined the sociology department at Georgia State University (GSU), where she served as an assistant professor until 2012. Reflecting on their shared time at GSU, her former colleague, sociologist Donald Reitzes, recounts, “During the next nine years, she did it all, and it is fair to say grew and prospered professionally…It was a joy to witness the ease and grace that accompanied her success.”
It was during her time at GSU Wingfield wrote some of her most popular articles: “The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man: African American Professionals’ Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace” (2007); “Racializing the Glass Escalator: Reconsidering Men’s Experiences with Women’s Work” (2010) (which won the Distinguished Article Award from ASA’s Race, Gender, and Class Section); and “Are Some Emotions Marked ‘Whites Only’? Racialized Feeling Rules in Professional Workplaces” (2010). “Adia’s most significant articles reveal how the cultural norms embedded in organizations perpetuate inequality,” says University of Michigan sociologist Karyn Lacy, a friend and colleague of Wingfield’s. “By drawing on populations largely overlooked by most researchers, Adia’s body of work highlights the importance of studying social phenomena through an intersectional lens, one that is attentive to race, class, and gender dynamics. Indeed, her scholarship is itself an indication of how much more we could learn about the world if we commit to diversifying educational institutions and workplaces to include scholars of color.”
In 2012, Wingfield received the Distinguished Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. That same year, she published her book, No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work (Temple University Press 2012). A spiritual successor to Doing Business with Beauty, No More Invisible Man received the 2014 Distinguished Book Award from the ASA’s Race, Gender, and Class Section.
Career Transitions and Gaining Recognition
In 2014, Wingfield helped reestablish the sociology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her colleague, sociologist Jake Rosenfeld says, “Put simply, without Adia’s leadership, the Department of Sociology at Washington University would not look anything like its present state. She was recruited for her brilliant scholarship, of course, but also for her vision of what comprises a cutting-edge, twenty-first-century sociology department.” Though the department started with four faculty members, today, the department is home to 15 full-time faculty members and 20 graduate students.
Adia Harvey Wingfield knows how to make the most of every moment, we mean it. For example, while serving as president of two major sociological associations and rebuilding an academic department, she published Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy (University of California Press 2019). Harvard University sociologist Frank Dobbin points out that Flatlining asks, “What does it mean…to be expected to solve problems of systemic bias against your own group that you had no part in creating?” This book, which received the 2019 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and the 2021 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class Section, introduces readers to two innovative concepts: “racial outsourcing” and “equity work.” In discussing the book, Christine Williams notes that hospitals are not the only sites where Black employees are expected to do most of the work associated with promoting equity and diversity. She shares, “The argument applies to virtually all large bureaucratic work organizations…When a mostly white department at a university hires a few Black professors, for example, they often end up advising all the students of color. Thanks to this book, we now have a name and a theory for this widespread institutionalized practice.”
Recognizing her substantial contributions to the field, she was awarded the Distinguished Career Award by the ASA’s Race, Gender, and Class Section in 2021. Reflecting on Wingfield’s academic career, Frank Dobbin shares, “[She] has pioneered an important new field in sociology, investigating the experiences of Black Americans at work, from hairdressers in Doing Business with Beauty to doctors, nurses, and health-care technicians in Flatlining…She has produced a brilliant, and fundamentally original, body of work.” In 2022, she was honored with the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association. This prestigious award is designated for individuals whose work reflects the intellectual traditions of notable African American scholars Oliver Cox, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier. It is given to scholars and institutions whose research focuses on social justice issues, including work addressing the experiences of African Americans and other populations affected by racial discrimination.
Despite these magnificent achievements and accolades, Wingfield is not one to rest on her laurels. In 2023, she published Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad 2023). Frank Dobbin sums up Gray Areas by writing, “Wingfield argues that it isn’t simply the formal organization of work and careers that sustain racial inequality at work. Just as important are the ‘gray areas’ in the workplace—informal relationships, unspoken expectations, and social networks.”
A Deep Commitment to Mentorship
Wingfield couples her successful scholarship with a deep commitment to mentorship and teaching. Melinda Mills, who worked with Wingfield as a graduate student at Georgia State University, recalls her admiration for Wingfield’s insistence on treating graduate students as full partners in the research process. Mills recalls how Wingfield treated her ideas with respect and recognition, and how she was able to “synthesize [their] voices in a way that felt authentic and accurate to both of our perspectives.” Mills is not alone in her fond memories of working with Wingfield—many former students, who have gone on to successful careers tell us how Wingfield consistently went exceeded the expectations of her mentorship role.
A recurring theme among Wingfield’s mentees is how she was instrumental in key moments in their academic careers, and several tell us they would not be where they are today without Wingfield’s support. One of the authors of this biography, Koji Chavez, says “Adia believed in me when I did not—without her encouragement I would not have become a professor.” Taura Taylor, who was once a graduate student under Wingfield and is now an assistant professor at Morehouse College, tells us that “Adia, to this day, will answer any questions I may have about my career path or how to advise my students.” Brandon Jackson, another author of this biography, states, “I have known Adia since 2010. I can’t count how many letters of recommendation she has written for me or how many versions of my writing she has provided feedback on!”
A key aspect of Wingfield’s mentorship is demonstrating to her students that they can produce excellent research, teaching, and public sociology while being a compassionate and caring person with a full life outside of work. Multiple mentees reiterated this point, but perhaps Taura Taylor said it best: “Adia is a doer, and her actions are the most impressionable instruction of all. She never boasts, she never makes others feel less than her, and she displays no traces of imposter syndrome. She is a phenom, one whose academic and professional ascent is admirable…and Adia is a whole person. She loves hip-hop, The Wire, SpelHouse Homecoming, and most of all, her family and friends. To admire Adia Harvey Wingfield is to admire an embodiment of acumen, self-assuredness, and authenticity.” Wingfield is truly an inspiration to the next generation of scholars.
Wingfield’s mentorship continues today as Washington University in St. Louis builds its graduate program. Current graduate student Antonia Roach tells us that Wingfield, “even with managing so much, still makes time for her students. She’s always responsive and open to jumping on a quick Zoom meeting to discuss any questions I might have… She holds space for me and the circumstances life brings.” Wingfield’s influence is still felt among her mentees who now thrive outside of academia. “The theory of racial tasks work that Adia developed and allowed me to contribute to, remains among my favorite projects,” Renée Skeete tells us. “I routinely share it with colleagues in my workplace because it remains deeply relevant. Nearly two decades after I began my graduate career, Adia remains one of my most important professional influences.”
Bringing Sociology to the Public
A core aspect of Wingfield’s professional career is a dedication to communicating sociology to a wider audience—what is the point of sociology if no one outside of academia reads it? Wingfield has made significant contributions to the public discourse as a Contributing Writer for the Atlantic. She has also published articles in notable outlets such as the Harvard Business Review, Vox, National Public Radio, Slate, Inside Higher Ed, and Fortune Magazine. Additionally, she has appeared on various podcasts, blogs, and TEDx presentations. One component of Wingfield’s public sociology seeks to make her work accessible to a public audience. Wingfield has written several opinion pieces regarding racial inequality in the workplace and its reasons, drawing from her research on workplace inequality.
Wingfield also draws on her sociological expertise to bring a sociological perspective to key issues of public debate. Wingfield has written several opinion pieces to describe the racial implications of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, including the heightened risks for Black physicians and how companies may inadvertently contribute to racial inequality as white women tend to have abortion benefits while women of color do not.
Wingfield’s talent is not only in applying a sociological eye to social problems; she also proposes sociologically driven solutions. She has contributed to public discourse regarding the short-term strategies companies can use to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s workforce participation, as well as how academic departments can cultivate a racially diverse faculty, drawing from her experience at Washington University in St. Louis. It is no surprise then, that in 2018, Dr. Wingfield received the Public Understanding of Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association.
In short, Wingfield is an emissary of sociology who clearly and effectively communicates sociological thought for public consumption and contributes thoughtfully to public discourse. As Frank Dobbin praises, “Wingfield documents her argument, based on years of research, using in-depth interviews to build a strong narrative arc that has drawn in workers and CEOs alike. Thus, she is not only the new ASA president, but also the new face of public sociology.” In a time when sociology as a discipline is under attack, Wingfield demonstrates the relevance and importance of sociology for our world today.
2025 Meeting Theme: Reimagining the Future of Work
Taura Taylor best sums up how exciting this year’s ASA conference will be: “Fellow classmates were just as amazed and dazzled by Wingfield as I was, so much so that her name became a verb used among us to exemplify exceptional performance: ‘I Adiaed that paper! I’m going to Adia my presentation today. You Adiaed that!’ I am sure anyone who has had the pleasure of meeting her is not too shocked by her newest role as president of the American Sociological Association. Adia is about to Adia ASA!”
The 120th ASA Annual Meeting will be held August 8-12, 2025, in Chicago, and Wingfield has chosen the theme “Reimagining the Future of Work.” Wingfield challenges sociologists to envision what the future of work will be: Is it a dystopian future of exploitation and entrenched economic inequality? A more optimistic model where affirming, decent, rewarding work is available to all who want it? Something in between? Or something completely new and different? Wingfield pushes sociology to tackle big societal questions and, more importantly, pushes sociologists to make their work relevant and exciting.
Koji Chavez, Indiana University- Bloomington
Brandon A. Jackson, The City University of New York-John Jay College,
New Editors of ASA Journals
Krystale E. Littlejohn and Amy L. Stone Appointed Inaugural Co-Editors of Sex & Sexualities
The inaugural co-editors of the new journal from ASA’s Sociology of Sexualities Section, Sex & Sexualities, are Krystale E. Littlejohn, University of Oregon, and Amy L. Stone, Trinity University. Littlejohn and Stone will lead the journal in the publication of cutting-edge sociological research on sexualities by fostering space for rigorous intersectional, interdisciplinary, transnational, feminist, and critical research. Sex & Sexualities will serve as a home to scholarship that has been historically devalued and will center work interrogating sexualities as a site of both resistance to and reproduction of broader patterns of social marginalization.
About Krystale E. Littlejohn
Krystale E. Littlejohn brings creativity, ingenuity, subject matter expertise, and administrative prowess to the position. As an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, Littlejohn is a publicly engaged scholar whose work focuses on socially marginalized communities and insists on the importance of scholarly interrogation of sex and sexualities. With her experience as an editorial board member, book series editor, and book editor, Littlejohn, with co-editor Amy Stone, is certain to propel a successful and generative launch for this new journal from the American Sociological Association Sociology of Sexualities Section.
Littlejohn’s award-winning research deploys both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate reproductive experiences and politics in the contemporary United States using a reproductive justice framework. Examining contraceptive use and abortion through the lens of inequality, Littlejohn centers real people’s lived experiences to unearth the intersectional constraints, pressures, and facilitators that govern people’s reproductive lives and well-being. Littlejohn’s facility with multiple methodologies and sociological theories will serve her well in this editorial role. Her subject matter expertise, moreover, makes her uniquely positioned to draw out and bring into focus the always implicit (but often hard to pin down) linkages between reproductive politics and queer politics through this new journal.
Editorial Experience and Service to the Discipline
Littlejohn has a great deal of experience as an editor. She has served as an editorial board member for five journals: Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Gender & Society, Socius, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. Her editorial experience is not restricted to peer-reviewed journals. She also serves as a series editor for the University of California Press Reproductive Justice book series. She was co-editor with Rickie Solinger of Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade (University of California Press 2024), a volume featuring more than 50 contributors. Her editorial experience has been collaborative and extensive, yielding a comprehensive understanding of best practices for supporting scholars in their writing and for facilitating a robust and humane review and publishing process.
Within ASA, Littlejohn has served in various positions in Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section (Treasurer, Council member), Family Section (Council member, Nominations Committee member), Medical Sociology Section (session organizer, roundtables organizer), and Sociology of Sex and Gender Section (Nominations Committee member). Additionally, she is on the Program Committee for the ASA 2026 Annual Meeting. Outside of ASA, Littlejohn serves the discipline as a member of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Population Sciences Subcommittee.
Littlejohn is a committed public sociologist. Her relevant, accessible, and relatable academic writing on topics of public interest lends itself to broad engagement, but Littlejohn does not wait for others to find her work. She publishes op-eds, participates in podcasts, and speaks with journalists. Littlejohn believes it is imperative that sociological work reach beyond the proverbial ivory tower.
Vision for the Journal
For Littlejohn and Stone, the challenge of starting—and building—a journal is an extraordinary opportunity to cultivate new orientations in the discipline. They begin from the understanding that the study of sex and sexuality is fundamentally intersectional and relates to all sociological subfields. With this journal, the increasingly popular topical focus on sex and sexualities will be given the space in which analytical approaches grounded in sex and sexuality may be refined and extended. This is distinct from the current publishing field wherein scholarship on sex and sexualities must often find a gender- or health-based frame, for example, to fit under the purview of existing journal foci.
Further, Littlejohn and Stone have set out a publishing model that will attend to the humanity of scholars, encouraging an ethic of care in all journal practices that prioritizes transparency, constructive and gracious review, and timely response.
This journal comes at a critical time. The current political moment of brutal legal restriction on abortion and gender-affirming care has piqued broader sociological interest in the areas of sex and sexualities—and underscored the crucial importance of sociological insights to public understanding. This attention is welcome—we need the contributions of scholars across sociology’s subfields to make sense of the how and why of these harrowing regulations, what resistance looks like, and what other worlds might exist.
With Littlejohn and Stone at the helm of Sex and Sexualities, we have a better chance that the new (and renewed) attention stemming from this political moment will be deeply researched and contextualized in the work that has come before, while harnessing the insights afforded by new perspectives. Sex and Sexualities will be the home base for what promises to be a rich literature that scholars across the discipline can draw on in the classroom, in their own research, and, indeed, to make sense of the world we live in.
By Katrina Kimport, University of California San Francisco
About Amy L. Stone
Amy L. Stone enters the position of co-editor of Sex & Sexualities with experience as deputy editor of one of the top sociology of gender journals and as a pioneer in the sociology of sexualities.
Stone, chair and professor of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University, is a publicly engaged scholar who has radically reshaped our sociological understandings of sexualities, space and place, and belonging and citizenship. A prolific scholar, Stone centers sexualities and LGBTQ people in their research to explore larger concepts central to sociology—belonging, citizenship, inequality, and placemaking. One of Stone’s most important and cutting-edge interventions in the sociology of sexualities is the study of towns and cities.
Editorial Experience
Stone brings extensive editorial experience to this role as an inaugural co-editor, having served as the deputy editor of Gender & Society from 2015-2019. In this role, they supervised the review of 135 manuscripts about sexualities and transgender studies. Stone also managed desk rejects, attended editorial board meetings, selected reviewers, synthesized reviewer feedback into decision letters, discussed revisions with authors, and managed revised manuscripts. Furthermore, they have been co-editor of two critical volumes in sexualities studies—Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (State University of New York Press 2015) with Jaime Cantrell and Outskirts: Queer Experiences on the Fringe (New York University Press 2024) with D’Lane R. Compton. Stone will now build on this experience to launch and establish the reputation of the ASA Sociology of Sexualities Section’s new journal.
Public Engagement and Service to the Discipline
Stone’s research not only contributes to sociology and academia but also contributes to broader society by working to improve the lives of LGBTQ people, especially LGBTQ youth of color. For example, Stone has collaborated with the Pride Center San Antonio to conduct community research for health equity and received its 2024 Leadership Icon Award. They have helped to write community reports, such as the Pride Center of San Antonio’s “State of Our Community: San Antonio LGBTQ+ 2020 Survey,” and their work has been featured in various news outlets, such as NBC News, USA Today, and the Advocate.
Stone has contributed immensely to the discipline. They are currently serving on the ASA Dissertation Award 2025 Selection Committee. In addition, they have served on the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant Decision Committee. Within the ASA Sociology of Sexualities Section, Stone has been on Council, the Publications Committee, the Martin P. Levine Memorial Dissertation Fellowship Committee, the Simon-Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award Committee, the Distinguished Book Award Committee, and the Distinguished Article Committee. Stone also served on the ASA Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender’s Distinguished Book Award Committee, and the Sociologists for Women in Society’s Nominations Committee, Program Committee, and Gender & Society Publications Committee. Stone builds on this extensive service to the discipline by now serving as an inaugural co-editor of Sex & Sexualities.
Vision for the Journal
Along with co-editor Krystale Littlejohn, Stone envisions the journal Sex & Sexualities as a place to consider how the study of sex and sexuality is profoundly intersectional and traverses all sociological subfields. The journal will be an exploration of the profound impact of sex and sexuality in contemporary communities. Scholarship published in the journal will demonstrate how the study of sex and sexuality is imperative for advancing sociological understandings of the world. Moreover, this journal would be the first and only journal that focuses on sex and sexuality using a sociological framework. The study of sex and sexualities has the potential to challenge the way sociology is practiced by expanding our understanding of the social world through the study of how society shapes sexuality and how sexuality shapes society.
Notably, the journal and its editorial team will center an ethic of care in all journal practices and strive to create a culture that attends to the humanity of scholars first and foremost. The editors plan to be transparent about how they review manuscripts and how they determine which ones advance to publishing and why. They will also aim to ensure that peer reviews are constructive and gracious. By establishing a journal that is topically unique, procedurally innovative, and culturally committed to advancing the study of sex and sexuality, the inaugural co-editors of Sex & Sexualities will shape the journal as one on the frontier of academic publication.
By Brandon Andrew Robinson, University of California-Riverside
Fred Markowitz Appointed Editor of Society and Mental Health
In a unanimous show of support, the American Sociology Association’s Sociology of Mental Health Section Council has appointed Fred Markowitz, professor of sociology and criminology at Northern Illinois University, as the next editor of the Section’s journal, Society and Mental Health.
Breadth of Experience
Markowitz’s research spans a wide range of topics, including criminalization, homelessness, recovery, stigma, and mental illness identity. His interdisciplinary approach to mental health and illness has been a hallmark of his career, allowing him to make significant contributions to sociology and related fields. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Criminology, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Aggression and Violent Behavior, Society and Mental Health, International Criminology, Advances in Criminological Theory, Deviant Behavior, Military Psychology, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Community Mental Health Journal, and Nordic Journal of Criminology.
Most recently, Markowitz was a fellow of the American Scandinavian Foundation and a researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy. His investigations in Finland—which focused on the complex relationships between mental illness, homelessness, and crime —are a testament to his commitment to addressing pressing public concerns through rigorous social science research. In 2021, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy and earned the title of dosentti, an academic recognition of scientific and teaching merit.
Markowitz is equally dedicated to teaching. He has taught various courses, such as criminology, social psychology, sociology of mental health and illness, quantitative research methods, sociological statistics, advanced quantitative research methods, theories of criminology, and a seminar in the sociology of mental illness. In 2020, Northern Illinois University recognized his teaching excellence in graduate education with its Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award.
Markowitz currently serves on the editorial boards of Society and Mental Health, Health Sociology Review, and Stigma and Health. He previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Editorial Vision
As editor for Society and Mental Health, Markowitz has outlined a clear and ambitious future for the journal in his vision statement. He intends to build on the success established by previous editors and aims to increase the journal’s prominence. Four fundamental guiding principles anchor his editorial strategy:
Commitment to Addressing Pressing Public Concerns: Markowitz will direct the journal to publish research that explores the causes, consequences, and social responses to the most pressing public concerns regarding mental health and illness. He aims to highlight sociologically informed research on issues such as loneliness, homelessness, psychological distress among young people, and the relationship between political extremism and mental health. He also plans to increase the promotion of Society and Mental Health research to the broader public, media, and policymakers.
Maintaining High-Quality, Objective Research: In response to the growing public scrutiny of sociology, Markowitz commits to upholding the highest standards of objective social science research. He will encourage submissions that employ strong causal methodologies and believes in the importance of evaluating research based on its scientific merit, independent of political considerations. He also values rich, theory-building qualitative work, recognizing its critical role in advancing the sociology of mental illness.
Efficient Editorial Process: Markowitz recognizes the importance of timely editorial decision-making and will maintain the journal’s excellent pace of processing and publishing article submissions. He aims to minimize the time between submissions to editorial decisions with plans to expand the pool of reviewers and rely on an editorial board with broad expertise.
Enhancing International and Interdisciplinary Relevance: Markowitz envisions Society and Mental Health as a globally interconnected and interdisciplinary journal. He will encourage submissions from scholars across various disciplines—such as epidemiology, psychiatry, psychology, public health, and criminology —and seek to include comparative perspectives from different countries. He also plans to add international scholars to the editorial board while ensuring that all research published in the journal remains sociologically informed.
With his strong research, teaching, and editorial experience background, Fred Markowitz is well-positioned to lead Society and Mental Health and continue the journal’s record of academic excellence and global influence.
By Teresa L. Scheid, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Spotlight on the Annual Meeting Location: The City at 100: A Volume and its Afterlives
By Jeffrey Nathaniel Parker, University of New Orleans
The 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Chicago happens to be taking place on the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of The City (University of Chicago Press 1925) by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, providing an excellent opportunity to consider the impact, afterlives, and contemporary relevance of this early outline of what urban sociology, and urban sociology specifically in Chicago, might be. Along with other seminal works such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (University of Pennsylvania Press 1899) and Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (Macmillan Company 1910), The City helped to set an agenda for urban research that has become an important part of the sociological enterprise in America. It has also been the object of critique, for reasons ranging from its generalizability (or lack thereof) to its significance within the sociological canon. At this year’s meeting, a panel is being convened to consider this volume from multiple angles—to think with each other about what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it tells us, not only about Chicago of 1925, but Chicago and places far beyond 100 years later.
The Chicago of The City was rife with the kind of massive change and inequality that so fascinated early sociologists concerned about the ravages of industrialization and urbanization. When Max and Marianne Weber visited America in 1904, for example, they were taken with Chicago, with Marianne describing it as “this monstrous city, still more than New York a point of crystillization [sic] of the American Spirit,” and Max stating that “the immense city—in area larger than London!—reminds me, except in the mansion districts, of a man whose skin is drawn back and whose insides you may see working” (Brann 1944:20-21). Soon after, Upton Sinclair’s novel-as-exposé The Jungle (Doubleday 1906), about poverty and poor working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking stockyards, would cause national outrage. Chicago was also growing quickly, spurred by European immigration (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918) and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South (Drake and Cayton 1945). In fact, from the city’s 1837 founding up to the early 20th century, the city’s population more than doubled every 10 years” (Dumlija and Masengarb 2016). Much of the city had burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and was rebuilt with skyscrapers, and by 1914 poet Carl Sandburg famously described it as “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; /Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders” (Sandburg 1914).
This was the historical ferment from which The City emerged. It situated itself firmly within the world its writers, sociologists at the University of Chicago, found themselves, famously calling for the use of the city as a social laboratory and describing Chicago itself as “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” (Park 1925:40). It also became famous for promulgating an ecological model of urbanism (McKenzie 1925) that some have argued naturalized the urban environment, including negative aspects such as segregation. Burgess’s concentric circle model of urban morphology that emphasizes processes of invasion and succession (Burgess 1925:51), and related discussion of natural areas, became practically metonymic of the volume and the broader Chicago School.
Although the volume’s subjects reach far beyond concentric circles and ecological modeling, there is no doubt these symbols and themes from the volume have proven over time to be prominent in the academic imagination. As a result, they have been the root of major critiques, as scholars have more explicitly drawn out the way things such as power and prejudice impact urban forms (Hunter 1953; Molotch 1976). The volume also, whether intentionally or not, centered Chicago as a de facto model for urbanism, despite other examples in the public sphere (such as Philadelphia and Atlanta, written about by Du Bois in 1899 and 1903, respectively, and New York City, as written about by journalistic muckrakers such as Nellie Bly in 1887 and Jacob Riis in 1890). This criticism has been covered extensively. The inaugural issue of City & Community was largely dedicated to a conversation about the Chicago School, sparked by a manifesto by Michael Dear (2002), in which he argues for a shift to a Los Angeles School. Mario Luis Small (2007) has cautioned against using the South Side of Chicago as a stand-in for all poor black neighborhoods, and Zandria Robinson (2014) and Betsie Garner (2018) have both pointed to the ways that urban sociology erases the American South. Scholars such as Deegan (1990), Wright (2002), Morris (2015), and Bartram et al (2021) have also noted that the writers of The City were not the only, or even the first, American scholars to study the city scientifically. Specifically, many have linked their elevation over other early urban scholars to the fact that research done contemporaneously and decades before was done by women and people of color who were historically marginalized in the discipline.
Critiques of The City point out that Chicago does not represent every city, and that the volume misses the mark on how many cities operate, change, and subsist. Both critiques are no doubt correct. Notably, though, they are also deeply in line with the values of the volume, as The City is not framed as a final answer on what cities are (or even on what Chicago is). From the subtitle of the first chapter—“Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment”—onward, the book is, if anything, tentative and contingent. Park constantly found himself breaking off his paragraphs about what he saw in Chicago to ask questions, such as in this section about neighborhoods early in the volume:
What are the elements of which [neighborhoods, racial communities, and segregated city areas] are composed?
To what extent are they the product of a selective process?
How do people get in and out of the group thus formed?
What are the relative permanence and stability of their populations?
What about the age, sex, and social condition of the people?
What about the children? How many of them are born, and how many of them remain?
What is the history of the neighborhood? What is there in this neighborhood’s subconsciousness—in the forgotten or dimly remembered experiences—that determines its sentiments and attitudes?
What is there in clear consciousness, i.e., what are its avowed sentiments, doctrines, etc.?
What does it regard as matter of fact? What is news? What is the general run of attention? What models does it imitate and are these within or without the group?
What is the social ritual, i.e., what things must one do in the neighborhood to escape being regarded with suspicion or looked upon as peculiar?
Who are the leaders? What interests in the neighborhood do they incorporate in themselves, and what is the technique by which they exercise control? (11-12)
These questions, these literal questions, one after another in staccato, appear repeatedly in The City, driving home an important point: this isn’t a book written by people who were certain of what was going on. Rather, it is an incitement to conversation, constantly searching, eternally conditional, written by people who were trying to puzzle it all out. At a time when our national discussion (and confusion) around media and disinformation seems at a fever pitch, for example, it is notable that Park and his colleagues were positively obsessed with how people came to get information about the city. These sections of the volume are not as famous as Burgess’s circles, but they are perhaps more relevant to the average citizen one hundred years later. The City poses other questions about issues that are still part of our national discussion—issues such as race, class, segregation, immigration, neighborhoods, juvenile delinquency, policing, collective behavior, vice, and political machines. This is not to say that the authors of The City foresaw everything—you won’t find climate change and AI in the volume, for those looking—but is does seem as though the authors were attempting to lay the urban issues of the day on a table and try to figure them out.
Notably, Park was a journalist before being a sociologist, and he acknowledged up front that “we are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary urban life”. Given this, and the volume’s fixation with knowledge (and non-knowledge), it is perhaps worth asking ourselves what we think we know about cities and how we think we know it. In his foreword to the latest edition Robert Sampson suggested that “a new generation of readers can now find their own nuggets of Park and Burgess to argue with, their own parts of the book to revise and overturn.” So, what can this volume, written one hundred years ago, still tell us about the way we live today? What did it get right? What did it get wrong? What could it have not possibly anticipated? What sources of information did it miss, and what should we be asking about cities today knowing what we know now? At the ASA Annual Meeting in August, members will gather, not to celebrate The City, but to ask questions about the city in the same spirit as the authors of the text.
References
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Bartram, Robin, Japonica Brown-Saracino, and Holly Donovan. 2021. “Uncertain Sexualities and the Unusual Woman: Depictions of Jane Addams and Emily Dickinson.” Social Problems 68(1):168–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spz058.
Brann, Henry Walter. 1944. “Max Weber and the United States.” The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 25(1):18–30.
Burgess, Ernest W. [1925] 2019. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project.” Pp.47-62 in The City by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. University of Chicago Press.
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Dumlija, Marko and Jen Masengarb 2016. Time traveling to 1908 Chicago. Chicago Architecture Center. https://www.architecture.org/online-resources/stories-of-chicago/time-traveling-to-1908-chicago
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In Remembrance: Michael Burawoy
Former ASA President Michael Burawoy, professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, was killed on February 3, 2025, in a hit-and-run incident in Oakland, CA. Burawoy was a leading figure in the discipline and an advocate for public scholarship. ASA and the International Sociological Association hosted an “Online Tribute in Memory of Michael Burawoy” on February 8, 2025. ASA will publish a full memorial tribute at a later date.
Advocacy Update!
ASA actively advocates for social science research on Capitol Hill. ASA, together with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the AFT-Maryland, filed a complaint in federal court in Maryland on February 25 that challenges a “Dear Colleague Letter” published by the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. The Association has also co-signed several public statements, including one urging the restoration of taxpayer-funded data removed from federal agency websites and another reaffirming our commitment to academic freedom, stable research funding, and evidence-based policy. Read our most recent advocacy efforts here. ASA remains dedicated to collaborating with others in the scientific research community to advance its mission: supporting sociologists, strengthening sociology as a science and profession, and promoting its societal contributions. To further these efforts, ASA publishes Rapid Response Reports (RRRs)—concise research briefs that provide background information and access to subject matter experts on timely sociological issues. These reports have been widely circulated in the media and on social platforms. You can explore ASA’s latest RRRs, press releases, and social media updates on Newswise—a valuable resource for journalists.
Is Your Research Federally Funded?
ASA is gathering insights from members who have received federal funding to showcase why efforts to reduce such funding—including indirect costs—are misguided. If you’re interested in sharing your work so that it can be highlighted, please email [email protected] with the subject line FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH. This is an open request with no deadline.
Expand the Public Understanding of Sociology
ASA’s Communications Director, Mary Spiro, frequently receives requests from media representatives seeking subject matter experts to comment on many topics relevant to the discipline of sociology. If she contacts you looking for a source, please respond quickly, as most media personnel are on tight deadlines. Likewise, if you have a story idea to pitch to the media or something you would like promoted through social media, don’t hesitate to contact Mary to discuss it. She can be reached at [email protected].
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