I am very pleased to share with you our section’s calls for submissions for its annual awards. Please consider nominating your work! We look forward to your submissions. 

May I highlight especially our newest awards:  

The Stuart Hall Award in Cultural Sociology for “a mid-career sociologist whose work holds great promise for advancing the cultural study of racial or ethnic inequality”  and the John Mohr Dissertation Improvement Award(s) “for racially or ethnically under-represented graduate student(s) at a public institution studying any topic.” 

I am grateful to everyone who has agreed to serve on one of the committees. 

Best wishes, 

Monika  

Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book  

Books published in the calendar year 2023 are eligible for this award. Authors must be section members to be eligible. Submit nominations through this online form. Self-nominations are encouraged. The deadline is January 31st, 2024.   

When their nomination is received, nominators will be sent details of the preferred postal addresses of committee members. To be considered, all the committee members must receive hard copies of the book by February 15^th 2024.  

Please direct any inquiries to committee chair Natasha Warikoo.  

Committee Members:  
Natasha Warikoo (Chair)  
Michaela DeSoucey 
Joshua Doyle   
Fiona Greenland   
Jyoti Puri   
Eric Schoon 

Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article 

Section members may nominate articles and original chapters of edited collections published in calendar years 2022-2023. Self- nominations are preferred. Authors must be members of the Culture Section. 

Please send the following to the chair of the prize committee, Laura Nelson: [1] a very brief nominating email, including a paragraph-long description of the article and its significance to culture, and [2] an electronic copy of the manuscript. Articles that are not accompanied by a nomination letter will not be considered for the prize. The deadline for receipt of nominations and articles is March 1st, 2024. 

Please direct any inquiries to committee chair, Laura Nelson (laura.k.nelson@ubc.ca). 

Committee Members:
Laura Nelson (Chair)
David Diehl
Jun (Philip) Fang
Carly Knight
Derron Wallace 

Stuart Hall Award in Cultural Sociology 

The annually organized Stuart Hall Award in Cultural Sociology recognizes a mid-career sociologist whose work holds great promise for advancing the cultural study of racial or ethnic inequality. The winner must be a cultural sociologist who uses cultural theories and/or methods in their research. They must have received a Ph.D. no less than five, but no more than 20, years before their candidacy. The winner will be expected to deliver a lecture in the course of the academic year following the award, most likely as part of the Section’s Culture and Contemporary Life Series. 

Nomination letters should make a strong, substantive case for the nominee’s selection and should discuss the nominee’s past work and anticipated future research trajectory as they relate to the study of both cultural sociology and the sociology of race and ethnicity. Self-Nominations are welcome. Nomination letters and CVs should be submitted through this form. The committee may be in touch to request copies of writings that are not easily accessible. The deadline for nominations is March 1st 2024. 

The committee may, in any given year, decide not to give the award. 

Please direct any inquiries to the Committee Chair, Monika Krause. 

Committee Members:
Prudence Carter
Gillian Gualtieri
Monika Krause (Chair)
Cresa Pugh
Nirmal Puwar 

Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Student Paper 

Section members may nominate any work (published or unpublished), written by someone who is a student at the time of submission. 

Self-nominations are welcome, through this form. Authors must be members of the Culture Section. 

The award recipient will receive a $300 prize to reimburse part of the cost of attending the 2023 ASA Annual Meeting. Any paper that receives an honorable mention will be awarded $100. Email an electronic copy of the paper to each member of the award committee. The deadline for receipt of nominations and articles is March 1st, 2024. 

Please direct any inquiries to committee chair Laura Adler. 

Committee Members:
Laura Adler (Chair)
Sourabh Singh
Fabien Accominotti
Jaleh Jalili
Galent Watts

John Mohr Dissertation Improvement Grant   

The John Mohr Dissertation Improvement Grant awards $1,000 each to two racially or ethnically under-represented graduate student at a public institution studying any topic.  The recipient must be a member of the Sociology of Culture section.    

This grant recognizes that scholars of color, especially graduate students, have been historically, systematically disadvantaged in academia and uses a commitment of material resources to acknowledge this harm and offer a small means of redress going forward.   

Criteria for the award will be based on graduate student standing, merit, and need. Application materials include a CV, a dissertation abstract, an explanation as to how the grant will be used to expand your research beyond existing resources, and a brief explanation of your identity as a member of a racially or ethnically underrepresented group. Please submit your application by email to all the members of the committee.

Committee Members:
Lyn Spillman (Chair), spillman.1@nd.edu   
Miray Philips, miray.philips@utoronto.ca  
Casandra Salgado, casandrasalgado@asu.edu  
Blake Silver, bsilver@gmu.edu  
Jeffrey Swindle, jswindle@g.harvard.edu  

Applications are due February 15th, 2024.  Notifications will be sent in advance of ASA.   

How to make a donation 

People interested in donating to the grant should send a check to the ASA accompanied by a cover letter identifying the section and purpose of the funds (i.e. it should clearly state that the funds are intended for the Sociology of Culture section’s John Mohr Dissertation Improvement Grant). Here you can find a template of a cover letter for making a donation. The ASA’s address for this purpose is the following:  

American Sociological Association
 c/o Governance Department
1430 K Street NW
Washington DC 20005  

Please simultaneously also email the section’s secretary/COO to alert them of the donation. Upon receiving the funds, the section’s secretary will then earmark them for the grant and coordinate with the John Mohr Grant Committee the allocation and distribution of the funds.  

The current donors that fund the John Mohr Award donate yearly. Donors can, of course, choose to donate year by year or to do so just once. If you plan to donate yearly, we request that you communicate to the section’s secretary expressing your interest in this regard. The secretary would then reach out to you each year (in September) to remind you about your donation.  

About John Mohr 

John Mohr  

John Mohr pioneered cultural research on meaning and measurement in sociology, focusing on institutional processes of meaning-making on topics ranging from poverty relief to institutional diversity initiatives. He spent his career at the University of California – Santa Barbara, and at different times served as Chair of the Culture Section and the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Behind the scenes, in a variety of roles, he dedicated his time and resources to diversity and equity initiatives. He died in 2019 of complications due to ALS.  

As an incredibly supportive mentor and a brilliant scholar, John Mohr left a substantive mark on an entire generation of cultural sociologists. Testaments of his immense influence in the field are the collective book Measuring Culture (Columbia University Press) and the recently published special issue of Poetics co-edited by two of Mohr’s advisees.