Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book

Books published in the calendar year 2024 (as per the print edition) are eligible for this award. Authors must be section members to be eligible. In case of co-authored books, at least one author must be a section member. Authors should nominate their book through this online form. The deadline is January 31st, 2025.

When their nomination is received, authors 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 15th 2025.

Please direct any inquiries to committee co-chairs Hajar Yazdiha or Anna Schwenk.  

Committee Members: 
Hajar Yazdiha (Co-Chair) 
Anna Schwenck (Co-Chair)
Peter Ore
Shyon Baumann  
Ana Villerreal  

Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article

Section members may nominate articles and original chapters of edited collections published in calendar years 2023-2024. Self- nominations are strongly preferred. Authors must be members of the Culture Section. In case of co-authored articles, at least one author must be a section member.

Please make submissions through this online form.  Submissions that are not accompanied by an explanation for how the article contributes to the sociological study of culture will not be considered for the prize. The deadline for receipt of nominations and articles is March 1st, 2025. 

Please direct any inquiries to committee chair, Aliza Luft (aluft@soc.ucla.edu)

Committee Members:
Aliza Luft (Chair)
AKM Skarpelis
Peter Francis Harvey
Neha Gondal
Kristopher Velasco 

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Section members may nominate any work (published or unpublished), written by someone who is a student at the time of submission.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. In case of co-authored articles, at least one author must be a section member.

Email an electronic copy of the paper to each member of the award committee. Submissions that are not accompanied by an explanation for how the article contributes to the sociological study of culture will not be considered for the prize. The deadline for receipt of nominations and articles is March 1st, 2025.

Please direct any inquiries to the committee chair, Elisabeth Becker (elisabeth.becker-topkara@mwi.uni-heidelberg.de).

Committee Members
Elisabeth Becker (Chair)
Ankit Bhardwaj
Taylor Laemmli
Taylor Price
Kangsan Lee

2025 Award Winner

Mary Douglas Award for Best Book

Winner:

• Reeves, Aaron, and Sam Friedman. Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024.

Honourable Mention:

• Pernell, Kim. Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation. Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

 

Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article

Winner:

• Fang, Jun. “The culture of censorship: State intervention and complicit creativity in global film production.” American Sociological Review

Honourable Mentions:

• Krippner, Greta R. “Gendered market devices: The persistence of gender discrimination in insurance markets.” American Journal of Sociology
• Yavaş, Mustafa. “White-collar opt-out: How “good jobs” fail elite workers.” American Sociological Review

 

Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Student Paper

• Kristen Miller, CUNY Graduate Center, “‘We Outside!’ Bike Life and the Collective Experience of Blackness Beyond Capture”
• Jack LaViolette, Columbia University, “Seeing Aliens: How ecological affordances produce UFO sightings”

2024 Award Winners

Mary Douglas Award for Best Book

Winners:

• Hajar Yazdiha, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton UP)
• Anna Schwenck, Flexible Authoritarianism: Cultivating Ambition and Loyalty in Russia (Oxford UP)

Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article

Winner:

• Aliza Luft. “The moral career of the genocide perpetrator: Cognition, emotions, and dehumanization as a consequence, not a cause, of violence.” Sociological Theory

• A.K.M. Skarpelis “Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography.” American Journal of Sociology
• Peter Francis Harvey “‘Everyone Thinks They’re Special’: How Schools Teach Children Their Social Station.” American Sociological Review

Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Student Paper

• Ankit Bhardwaj, “Doubtful Calculation: How Experts Build Trust in Uncertain Energy Futures”
• Taylor Laemmli, “Class Experience Mobility through Consumption, Work, and Relationships”

Previous Award Winners

Mary Douglas Award (Best Book)

• 2023, co-winner: Karen A. Cerulo and Janet M. Ruane, 2022. Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine the Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• 2023, co-winner: Raúl Pérez, 2022. The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• 2023, honorable mention: Noah Amir Arjomand, 2022. Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• 2022, co-winner: Fiona Greenland, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press 2021)
• 2022, co-winner: Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Figures of the Future: Figures for the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press 2021)
• 2022, honorable mention: Tad Skotnicki, The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture (Stanford University Press 2021)
• 2021, co-winner: Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2020. Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. Chicago University Press.
• 2021, co-winner: Matthew Clair. 2020. Privilege and Punishment. How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. Princeton University Press.
• 2021, honorable mention: Erin Metz McDonnell. 2020. Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States. Princeton University Press.
• 2021, honorable mention: Anne Warfield Rawls & Waverly Duck. 2020.Tacit Racism. University of Chicago Press.
• 2020, co-winner: Orly Clergé. 2019. The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia.
  Berkeley: University of California Press
• 2020, co-winner: Roi Livne. 2019. Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
• 2019: Karida Brown, University of California, Los Angeles, for: Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia.  University of North Carolina Press.
• 2018, co-winner: Clayton Childress Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. (Princeton, 2017)
• 2018, co-winner: Bin Xu The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China. (Stanford, 2017)
• 2017, co-winner: Michaela DeSoucey, Contested Tastes. Foie Gras and the Politics of Food. (2017, Princeton University Press)
• 2017, co-winner: Nicole Gonzalez van Cleve, Crook County. Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. (2016, Stanford University Press)
• 2016: Lauren Rivera, How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton University Press
• 2015: Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009. Oxford University Press
• 2014: Virag Molnar, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State formation in Postwar Central Europe. Routledge 2013
• 2013: Lynette Spillman, Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations. University of Chicago Press
• 2012: Claudio Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession. University of Chicago Press
• 2011, co-winner:  Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. University of Minnesota Press
• 2011, co-winner: David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Harvard University Press.
• 2010, co-winner: Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton University Press
• 2010, co-winner: Allison Pugh, Parents, Children and Consumer Culture. University of California Press

Clifford Geertz Award (Best Article)

• 2023: Gary J. Adler Jr., Daniel DellaPosta and Jane Lankes, 2022. “Aesthetic Style: How Material Objects Structure an Institutional Field.” Sociological Theory 40(1): 51-81.
• 2023, honorable mention: Eric W. Schoon, 2022. “Operationalizing Legitimacy.” American Sociological Review 87(3): 478-503.
• 2022: Talia Shiff. 2021. “A Sociology of Discordance: Negotiating Schemas of Deservingness and Codified Law in U.S. Asylum Status Determinations,” American Journal of Sociology 127(2): 337-375.
• 2022, honorable mention: Andrei Boutyline and Laura K. Soter. 2021. “Cultural Schemas: What they Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One,” American Sociological Review 86(4): 728-758.
• 2022, honorable mention: Amanda Barret Cox. 2021. “Powered Down: The Microfoundations of Organizational Attempts to Redistribute Power,” American Journal of Sociology 127(2): 1-52.
• 2021, co-winner: Daniel DellaPosta, “Pluralistic Collapse: The ‘Oil Spill’ Model Of Mass Opinion Polarization” published in the American Sociological Review. 
• 2021, co-winner: Kevin Kiley and Stephen Vaisey, “Measuring Change and Stability in Personal Culture Using Panel Data” published in the American Sociological Review.
• 2021, honorable mention: Craig M. Rawlings and Clayton Childress. “Emergent Meanings: Reconciling Dispositional and Situational Accounts of Meaning-Making from Cultural Objects” published in The American Journal of Sociology.
• 2020: Hallett, Tim, Orla Stapleton, and Michael Sauder. “Public ideas: Their varieties and careers.” American Sociological Review 84, no. 3 (2019): 545-576.
• 2019: Karen A. Cerulo, Rutgers University, for: Scents and sensibility: olfaction, sense-making, and meaning attribution. American Sociological Review, 83(2), 361-389.
• 2018: Joosse, Paul. 2017. “Max Weber’s Disciples: Theorizing the Charismatic Aristocracy.” Sociological Theory 35(4): 334-358.
• 2018, honorable mention: Frye, Margaret. 2017. “Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi.” American Sociological Review 82(5): 945-976
• 2017: Daniel Winchester, “A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action,” 2016. Social Forces 95(2): 585-606.
• 2017, honorable mention: Chana Teeger, “‘Both Sides of the Story’: History Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” (2015, in American Sociological Review 80(6): 1175-1200)
• 2016, co-winner: Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph, “Civic Action,”  2014. American Journal of Sociology, 120(3):798-863
• 2016, co-winner: Ruth Braunstein, Brad R. Fulton, and Richard L. Wood, “The Role of Bridging Cultural Practices in Racially and Socioeconomically Diverse Civic Organizations” 2014. American Sociological Review, 79(4), 705-725
• 2015: Matthew Norton, “Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System,” 2014. American Journal of Sociology, 119 (6): 1537-1575
• 2014, co-winner: Iddo Tavory and Nina Eliasoph, “Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation,” 2013. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4):908-942.
• 2014, co-winner: Arnout van de Rijt, Eran Shor, Charles Ward and Steven Skienaa, “Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media,” 2013. American Sociological Review, 78(2):266–289.
• 2013: Lauren Rivera, “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms,” 2012. American Sociological Review 77(6):

Richard A. Peterson Award (Best Student Paper)
**Changed from the Suzanne Langer award in 2011.**

• 2023, co-winner: Tomás Gold, 2022. “Contentious Tactics as Jazz Performances: A Pragmatist Approach to the Study of Repertoire Change.” Sociological Theory 40(3): 249-271.
• 2023, co-winner: Turgut Keskintürk, 2022. “Religious belief alignment: The structure of cultural beliefs from adolescence to emerging adulthood.” Poetics 90: 101591.
• 2023, honorable mention: Sarah Larissa Combellick, 2023. “‘My Baby Went Straight to Heaven’: Morality Work in Abortion Online Storytelling.” Social Problems 70(1): 87-103.
• 2022: Patrick Sheehan. 2022. “The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise: How Unemployed Workers Become Professional Career Coaches.” American Journal of Sociology 127 (4): 1151–1182.
• 2021, co-winner: Acosta, Laura. 2021. “Victimhood dissociation and conflict resolution: evidence from the Colombian peace plebiscite” published in Theory and Society.
• 2021, co-winner: Hart, Chloe Grace. 2021. “Trajectory Guarding: Managing Unwanted, Ambiguously Sexual Interactions at Work” published in American Sociological Review. 
• 2020: Lindsay J. DePalma (UC, San Diego). “The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of ‘Do What You Love.'”
• 2020, honorable mention: Jeffrey Swindle (University of Michigan). “Pathway of Global Cultural Diffusion: Media and Attitudes about Violence against Women.”
• 2019: Jacqui Frost, University of Minnesota, for “The Meaning of Uncertainty: Navigating States of Certainty and Uncertainty in Nonreligious Narratives”
• 2019, honorable mention: Yağmur Karakaya, University of Minnesota, for “The Conquest of Hearts: the Central Role of Ottoman Nostalgia within Contemporary Turkish Populism” American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
• 2018: Anya Degenshein, Northwestern University “Strategies of Valuation: Repertoires of Worth at the Financial Margins”
• 2018, honorable mention: Lily Liang,  Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison “No Room for Respectability: Boundary Work in Interaction at a Shanghai Rental”
• 2018, honorable mention: Talia Shiff,  Northwestern University “Evaluating the Case: Encounters of Schematic Accordance and Discordance in Asylum Adjudications.”
• 2017: Matthew Clair (Harvard University), “Resources, Navigation, and Punishment in the Criminal Courts”
• 2017, honorable mention: Mary Beth Fallin Hunzaker (Duke University), “Cultural Sentiments and Schema-Consistency Bias in Information Transmission”
• 2016: co-winner: Holly Campeau (University of Toronto)  “‘The Right Way, the
  Wrong Way, and the Blueville Way’: How Cultural Match Matters for
  Standardization in the Police Organization.”
• 2016: co-winner: Hannah Wohl (Northwestern University) “Community Sense: The
  Cohesive Power of Aesthetic Judgment”
• 2015: Monica C. Bell, “Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism.”
• 2014, co-winner: H.E.M.
• 2014, co-winner: Laura K. Nelson, “Enduring Cultural/Cognitive Structures: Political Logics as Cultural ‘Memory.’”
• 2013, co-winner: Charles Seguin, “The Mathematics of Superstars: Two Theories of Cultural Consumption”
• 2013, co-winner: Phillipa K. Chong, “Legitimate Judgment in Art, The Scientific World Reversed?: Critical Distance in Evaluation.”
• 2012: Christina Simko,  “Rhetorics of Suffering: September 11 Commemorations as Theodicy.”
• 2011: Avi Astor, “Memory, Community, and Opposition to Mosques: The Case of Badalona.” Theory and Society.
• 2010:  Iddo Tavory, “Everyday Morality–Street Danger and Moral Density in a Jewish Orthodox Neighborhood”
• 2009: Anna Paretskaya, “The Soviet Communist Party and the Other Spirit of Capitalism.”
• 2008: Gabriel Abend, “Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality.” in Theory and Society, 37(2):87-125.
• 2007: Hiro Saito, “Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma.” in Sociological Theory, 24(4):353-376.
• 2006, co-winner: Jason Matt, “The Cultural pragmatics of Event-ness: The Clinton/Lewinsky Affair”
• 2006, co-winner: Kim Babon, “Composition: Coherence, and Attachment: The Critical Role of Context in Reception”
• 2005: Gregoire Mallard, “Communities of Interpreters and Their Technical Instruments,” American Sociological Review. 70:992-1010. 
• 2004: Virag Molnar, “Cultural Politics and Modernist Architecture: The Tulip Debate in Post-War Hungary”
• 2003: Karen Danna Lynch, “The Good Mother: Ideologies of Motherhood 1950-1998”
• 2002: Genevieve Zubrzycki, “We the Polish Nation: Ethnic and Civic Visions of Nationhood in Post-Communist Constitutional Debates”
• 2001, co-winner: Jamie Mullaney,  “Like A Virgin: Temptation, Resistance, and the Construction of Identities Based on ‘Not Doings’”
• 2001, co-winner: Shyon Baumann, “Intellectualizing Discourse and Art World Development: The Case of Film in the United States”
• 2000: Gabriella Fried, “On Remembering and Silencing the Past: The Adult Children of the Disappeared of Argentina and Uruguay in Comparative Perspective”
• 1999: Kari Lerum, “Twelve-Step Feminism Makes Sex Workers Sick: How the State and the Recovery Movement Turn Radical Women into ‘Useless Citizens’”
• 1998: Kristen Purcell, “A League of Their Own: Mental Leveling and the Creation of Social Comparability in Sport”
• 1997: Wayne Brekhus, “Social Marking and the Mental Coloring of Identity: Sexual Identity Construction and Maintenance in the United States”
• 1996: Ronald N. Jacobs, “Civil Society and Crisis: Culture, Discourse, and the Rodney King Beating”
• 1995, co-winner: Bethany Bryson, “Anything but Heavy Metal: Identity and Exclusion in Musical Taste”
• 1995, co-winner: Stephen Ellingson, ”Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action: Public Debate and Rioting in Ante-bellum Cincinnati”
• 1994: Matthew P. Lawson,  “Free to Choose: Submission in the Lives of Catholic Charismatics”
• 1993: Timothy Dowd, “The Song Remains the Same? The Musical Diversity and Industry Context of Number One Songs, 1955-1988”
• 1992: Christiana Nippert-Eng, [unknown]
• 1991: Ann Bowler, [unknown]
• 1990: Ken Dauber, [unknown]