UC Press’s award-winning Sociology publishing program is known for its focus on contemporary social problems, global health, racial justice, and human rights. We publish ground-breaking books that have shaped and challenged the discipline.

But none of this would exist without our amazing authors. We’re proud to be publishing the work of so many award-winning sociologists. All the authors below have won distinguished scholarship awards from the ASA – please take a minute to congratulate them on social at #ASA2020 & #ASA20!

Orly Clerge

Mary C. Douglas Prize for Best Book 2020
C. Wright Mills Award Finalist 2019

Orly Clerge is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is coeditor of Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty Overcome Challenges and Thrive in the Academy.

The New Noir
Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia

In The New Noir, Orly Clerge explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. The Black middle class today consists of diverse groups whose ongoing cultural, political, and material ties to the American South and Global South shape their cultural interactions at work, in their suburban neighborhoods, and at their kitchen tables. Clerge compellingly analyzes the making of a new multinational Black middle class and how they create a spectrum of Black identities that help them carve out places of their own in a changing 21st-century global city.

Dawn Marie Dow

William J. Goode Book Award

Dawn Marie Dow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Faculty Associate at the Maryland Population Research Center.

Mothering While Black
Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood

Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. At the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, work, family, and culture, Mothering While Black sheds light on the exclusion of African American middle-class mothers from the dominant cultural experience of middle-class motherhood.

Jerry Flores

Children & Youth Early Career Award

Jerry Flores is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

Caught Up
Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration

From home, to school, to juvenile detention center, and back again. Follow the lives of fifty Latina girls living forty miles outside of Los Angeles, California, as they are inadvertently caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. Their experiences in the connected programs between “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” Community School reveal the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. The girls participate in well-intentioned wraparound services designed to provide them with support at home, at school, and in the detention center. But these services may more closely resemble the phenomenon of wraparound incarceration, in which students, despite leaving the actual detention center, cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention, and are thereby slowly pushed away from traditional schooling and a productive life course.

 Angela S. García 

Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book Award 2020

Angela S. García is a sociologist and Assistant Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. 

Legal Passing
Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law

Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of fleeing restrictive localities, undocumented Mexicans react by presenting themselves as “legal,” masking the stigma of illegality to avoid local police and federal immigration enforcement. Combining social theory on immigration and race as well as place and law, Legal Passing uncovers the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of contemporary immigration laws in the US.

Adia Harvey-Wingfield

C. Wright Mills Award 2019

Adia Harvey Wingfield is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a regular contributor to Slate, Harvard Business Review, and the Atlantic. Her previous book is No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work.

Flatlining
Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy

 In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in “racial outsourcing,” relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do “equity work”—extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color. Wingfield argues that as these organizations become more profit driven, they come to depend on black health care professionals to perform equity work to serve increasingly diverse constituencies. Yet black workers often do this labor without recognition, compensation, or support. Operating at the intersection of work, race, gender, and class, Wingfield makes plain the challenges that black employees must overcome and reveals the complicated issues of inequality in today’s workplaces and communities.

Norah MacKendrick

Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award 2020

Norah MacKendrick is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University.

Better Safe Than Sorry
How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics

How toxic are the products we consume on a daily basis? Whether it’s triclosan in toothpaste, formaldehyde in baby shampoo, endocrine disruptors in water bottles, or pesticides on strawberries, chemicals in food and personal care products are of increasing concern to consumers. This book chronicles how ordinary people try to avoid exposure to toxics in grocery store aisles using the practice of “precautionary consumption.”

Tey Meadow

Distinguished Scholarly Book Award 2020

Tey Meadow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Meadow is coeditor of Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology with D’Lane Compton and Kristen Schilt.

Trans Kids
Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century

Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, sociologist Tey Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition. Where once atypical gender expression was considered a failure of gender, now it is a form of gender. Engaging and rigorously argued, Trans Kids underscores the centrality of ever more particular configurations of gender in both our physical and psychological lives, and the increasing embeddedness of personal identities in social institutions.

Aldon Morris

W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award 2020

Read our Q&A with Aldon Morris about the award!

Aldon D. Morris is Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University and the author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, among other books.

The Scholar Denied
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible. The Scholar Denied is based on extensive, rigorous primary source research; the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision.

Eddy U

Barrington Moore Book Award 2020

Eddy U is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Disorganizing China: Counter-Bureaucracy and the Decline of Socialism.

Creating the Intellectual
Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification

Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, “the intellectual” was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals, an identification that profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities, forms of organization, and associations in Chinese society. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the legacy of which still affects ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and feeling in what is now a globalized China. 

Celeste Watkins-Hayes

Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award 2020

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is also the author of The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform.

Remaking a Life
How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality

Remaking a Life uses the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a lens to understand how women generate radical improvements in their social well being in the face of social stigma and economic disadvantage. Drawing on interviews with nationally recognized AIDS activists as well as over one hundred Chicago-based women living with HIV/AIDS, Celeste Watkins-Hayes takes readers on an uplifting journey through women’s transformative projects, a multidimensional process in which women shift their approach to their physical, social, economic, and political survival, thereby changing their viewpoint of “dying from” AIDS to “living with” it.

Melissa J. Wilde

ASA Sociology of Religion Distinguished Book Award 2020

Melissa J. Wilde is a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Vatican II, won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Although most of Wilde’s research has focused on religious change, her most recent research—which she describes as the study of “complex religion”—focuses on what has not changed within American religion, in particular, the enduring ways that it intersects with race, class, and gender today.

Birth Control Battles
How Race and Class Divided American Religion

Using a veritable treasure trove of data, including census and archival materials and more than 10,000 articles, statements, and sermons from religious and secular periodicals, Melissa J. Wilde demonstrates that the push to liberalize positions on contraception was tied to complex views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny among America’s most prominent religious groups. Taking us from the Depression era, when support for the eugenics movement saw birth control as an act of duty for less desirable groups, to the 1960s, by which time most groups had forgotten the reasons behind their stances on contraception (but not the concerns driving them), Birth Control Battles explains how reproductive politics divided American religion. In doing so, this book shows the enduring importance of race and class for American religion as it rewrites our understanding of what it has meant to be progressive or conservative in America.

And a special call-out to our authors who have won awards in 2020 for their scholarship in sociology beyond the ASA honors!

You can also see our 2019 ASA award-winners here.

Learn more about UCPress at #ASA2020 at our virtual conference exhibit.