UC Press is proud to celebrate this year’s ASA award-winning authors! Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news.
Don’t forget to visit our #ASA2021 virtual exhibit to get 40% the books featured below.
Celeste Watkins-Hayes
Distinguished Scholarly Book Award 2021
American Sociological Association
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
In the face of life-threatening news, how does our view of life change—and what do we do it transform it? 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. With an eye towards improving the lives of women, Remaking a Life provides techniques to encourage private, nonprofit, and government agencies to successfully collaborate, and shares policy ideas with the hope of alleviating the injuries of inequality faced by those living with HIV/AIDS everyday.
Don’t Miss the ASA Bookforum Session
Monday, August 9th at 2:30pm ET (VAM, Room 1)
Laura Enriquez
Distinguished Book Award 2021, Co-winner
American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section
William J. Goode Book Award 2021
American Sociological Association, Family Section
Laura E. Enriquez is Assistant Professor of Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family
Of Love and Papers explores how immigration policies are fundamentally reshaping Latino families. Drawing on two waves of interviews with undocumented young adults, Enriquez investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain family formation. The imprint of illegality remains, even upon obtaining DACA or permanent residency. Interweaving the perspectives of US citizen romantic partners and children, Enriquez illustrates the multigenerational punishment that limits the upward mobility of Latino families. Of Love and Papers sparks an intimate understanding of contemporary US immigration policies and their enduring consequences for immigrant families. A free open access ebook is available. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
Read a Q&A with Laura Enriquez
Angela García
Oliver Cromwell Cox Award
American Sociological Association, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section
Distinguished Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section
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. Restrictive laws coerce assimilation, because as legal passing becomes habitual and embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities. In accommodating destinations, undocumented Mexicans experience a localized sense of stability and membership that is simultaneously undercut by the threat of federal immigration enforcement and complex street-level tensions with local police. 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.
View a special video spotlight with Angela García
Rocío Rosales
Distinguished Book Award 2021, Co-winner
American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section
Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award 2021, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association, International Migration Section
Rocío Rosales is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles
This book examines the social worlds of young Latino street vendors as they navigate the complexities of local and federal laws prohibiting both their presence and their work on street corners. Known as fruteros, they sell fruit salads out of pushcarts throughout Los Angeles and are part of the urban landscape. Drawing on six years of fieldwork, Rocío Rosales offers a compelling portrait of their day-to-day struggles. In the process, she examines how their paisano (hometown compatriot) social networks both help and exploit them. Much of the work on newly arrived Latino immigrants focuses on the ways in which their social networks allow them to survive. Rosales argues that this understanding of ethnic community simplifies the complicated ways in which social networks and social capital work. Fruteros sheds light on those complexities and offers the concept of the “ethnic cage” to explain both the promise and pain of community.
View a special video spotlight with Rocío Rosales
Jennifer Randles
William J. Goode Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Family Section
Jennifer M. Randles is Chair and Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at California State University, Fresno, and author of Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America.
Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering
In Essential Dads, sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.
View a special video spotlight with Jennifer Randles
Julia Chuang
Distinguished Scholarly Book Award 2021
American Sociological Association, Labor and Labor Movements section
Sociology of Development Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Sociology of Development Section
Transnational Asia Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Asia and Asian America section
Julia Chuang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College.
Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market
For nearly four decades, China’s manufacturing boom has been powered by the labor of 287 million rural migrant workers, who travel seasonally between villages where they farm for subsistence and cities where they work. Yet recently local governments have moved away from manufacturing and toward urban expansion and construction as a development strategy. As a result, at least 88 million rural people to date have lost rights to village land. In Beneath the China Boom, Julia Chuang follows the trajectories of rural workers, who were once supported by a village welfare state and are now landless. This book provides a view of the undertow of China’s economic success, and the periodic crises—a rural fiscal crisis, a runaway urbanization—that it first created and now must resolve.
View Julia Chuang’s book talk at the Cornell East Asia Program
Danielle Raudenbush
2020 C. Wright Mills Award
Society for the Study of Social Problems
Danielle T. Raudenbush is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego.
Health Care Off the Books: Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America
Millions of low-income African Americans in the United States lack access to health care. How do they treat their health care problems? In Health Care Off the Books, Danielle T. Raudenbush provides an answer that challenges public perceptions and prior scholarly work. Informed by three and a half years of fieldwork in a public housing development, Raudenbush shows how residents who face obstacles to health care gain access to pharmaceutical drugs, medical equipment, physician reference manuals, and insurance cards by mobilizing social networks that include not only their neighbors but also local physicians. However, membership in these social networks is not universal, and some residents are forced to turn to a robust street market to obtain medicine. For others, health problems simply go untreated.
Read our Q&A with Danielle Raudenbush
Garret Christensen, Jeremy Freese, and Edward Miguel
2021 Outstanding Publication Award
American Sociological Association, Section on Methodology
Garret Christensen is an Economist at the U.S. Census Bureau and was formerly a Research Scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. His research focuses on the impacts of social safety-net programs.
Jeremy Freese is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, and Co-Principal Investigator of the General Social Survey and Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. His research focuses on topics that connect social inequality, health, and social change.
Edward Miguel is Oxfam Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Effective Global Action. His research focus is on African economic development.
Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science
Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research is the first book to summarize and synthesize new approaches to combat false positives and non-reproducible findings in social science research, document the underlying problems in research practices, and teach a new generation of students and scholars how to overcome them. Understanding that social science research has real consequences for individuals when used by professionals in public policy, health, law enforcement, and other fields, the book crystallizes new insights, practices, and methods that help ensure greater research transparency, openness, and reproducibility. Readers are guided through well-known problems and are encouraged to work through new solutions and practices to improve the openness of their research. Created with both experienced and novice researchers in mind, Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research serves as an indispensable resource for the production of high quality social science research.
Brandon Andrew Robinson
2021 Distinguished Book Award, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association, Sex and Gender Section
Brandon Andrew Robinson is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and coauthor of Race and Sexuality.
Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness
Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth’s lives before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.
Rene Almeling
2021 Distinguished Book Award, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association, Sex and Gender Section
Rene Almeling is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University and the author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm.
GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health
For more than a century, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies. But only recently have researchers begun to ask basic questions about how men’s health matters for reproductive outcomes, from miscarriage to childhood illness. What explains this gap in knowledge, and what are its consequences? Rene Almeling examines the production, circulation, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men’s reproductive health. From a failed nineteenth-century effort to launch a medical specialty called andrology to the contemporary science of paternal effects, there has been a lack of attention to the importance of men’s age, health, and exposures. Analyzing historical documents, media messages, and qualitative interviews, GUYnecology demonstrates how this non-knowledge shapes reproductive politics today.
Watch a virtual Q&A with Rene Almeling.
Lauren Duquette-Rury
2021 Distinguished Publication Award
American Sociological Association, Development Section
Lauren Duquette-Rury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University.
Exit and Voice: The Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico
Sometimes leaving home allows you to make an impact on it—but at what cost? Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of the communities they have left behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, migrants have willingly stepped in to supply public goods when local or state government lack the resources or political will to improve the town. Though migrants’ cross-border investments often improve citizens’ access to essential public goods and create a more responsive local government, their work allows them to unintentionally exert political engagement and power, undermining the influence of those still living in their hometowns. In looking at the paradox of migrants who have left their home to make an impact on it, Exit and Voice sheds light on how migrant transnational engagement refashions the meaning of community, democratic governance, and practices of citizenship in the era of globalization.