Submissions and Nominations for 2024 Section Awards
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 15th 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.
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.
2023 Award Winners
Mary Douglas Award for Best Book
Co-winners:
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.
Raúl Pérez, 2022. The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Honorable Mention:
Noah Amir Arjomand, 2022. Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Committee Members: Terry McDonnell (Chair), Waverly Duck, Rebecca Jean Emigh, Amin Ghaziani, Fatma Gocek, Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz
Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article
Winner:
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.
Honorable Mention:
Eric W. Schoon, 2022. “Operationalizing Legitimacy.” American Sociological Review 87(3): 478-503.
Committee Members: Iddo Tavory (Chair), Sharon Quinsaat, Jeff Sheng, Christina Simko, Yongren Shi, Talia Shiff
Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Student Paper
Co-winners:
Tomás Gold, 2022. “Contentious Tactics as Jazz Performances: A Pragmatist Approach to the Study of Repertoire Change.” Sociological Theory 40(3): 249-271.
Turgut Keskintürk, 2022. “Religious belief alignment: The structure of cultural beliefs from adolescence to emerging adulthood.” Poetics 90: 101591.
Honorable Mention:
Sarah Larissa Combellick, 2023. “‘My Baby Went Straight to Heaven’: Morality Work in Abortion Online Storytelling.” Social Problems 70(1): 87-103.
Committee Members: Paul Joosse (Chair), Elisabeth Becker, Matteo Bortolini, Larissa Buchholz,
Jun Fang, Meltem Odabas
Congratulations to all the Culture Section Awards winners!
Thank You to all Culture Section Award Committee Members and Chairs for all of your work on these committees!
2022 Award Winners
Mary Douglas Award for Best Book
Committee: Juan-Pablo Parda Guerra (chair), Matt Clair, Michal Pagis, Victoria Reyes, Fernando Dominguez Rubio, Anna Skarpelis
Co-winners:
Fiona Greenland, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press 2021)
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Figures of the Future: Figures for the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press 2021)
Honorable Mention:
Tad Skotnicki, The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture (Stanford University Press 2021)
Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article
Committee: Mathieu Desan (chair), Hillary Angelo, Jelani Ince, Carly Knight, Caroline Lee, Blake Silver
Winner:
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.
Honorable Mentions:
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.
Amanda Barret Cox. 2021. “Powered Down: The Microfoundations of Organizational Attempts to Redistribute Power,” American Journal of Sociology 127(2): 1-52.
Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Graduate Student Paper
Committee: Mariana Craciun (chair), Holley Campeau, Chloe Hart, Amy Singer, Kris Velasco, Celso Villegas
Winner:
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 Award Winners
Winner of the 2021 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book
- Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2020. Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. Chicago University Press.
- Matthew Clair. 2020. Privilege and Punishment. How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. Princeton University Press.
Honorable Mentions:
- Erin Metz McDonnell. 2020. Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States. Princeton University Press.
- Anne Warfield Rawls & Waverly Duck. 2020.Tacit Racism. University of Chicago Press.
- Daniel DellaPosta, “Pluralistic Collapse: The ‘Oil Spill’ Model Of Mass Opinion Polarization” published in the American Sociological Review.
- Kevin Kiley and Stephen Vaisey, “Measuring Change and Stability in Personal Culture Using Panel Data” published in the American Sociological Review.
- Acosta, Laura. 2021. “Victimhood dissociation and conflict resolution: evidence from the Colombian peace plebiscite” published in Theory and Society.
- Hart, Chloe Grace. 2021. “Trajectory Guarding: Managing Unwanted, Ambiguously Sexual Interactions at Work” published in American Sociological Review.
- Orly Clergé. 2019. The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia.
Berkeley: University of California Press - Roi Livne. 2019. Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
- Karida Brown, University of California, Los Angeles, for: Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press.
- Committee members: Clayton Childress (co-chair), Bin Xu (co-chair), Kelsy Burke, Eva Illouz, Richard Ocejo.
- Karen A. Cerulo, Rutgers University, for: Scents and sensibility: olfaction, sense-making, and meaning attribution. American Sociological Review, 83(2), 361-389.
- Committee members: Paul Joosse (chair), Larissa Buchholz, Sam Friedman, Ellis Monk, Ori Schwarz.
- Winner: Jacqui Frost, University of Minnesota, for “The Meaning of Uncertainty: Navigating States of Certainty and Uncertainty in Nonreligious Narratives”
- 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, (forthcoming).
- Committee members: Anya Degenshein (chair), Alison Gerber, Fiona Greenland, Svetlana Kharchenkova, Hannah Wohl.
- 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
- 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):
- 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: Hassan El Menyawi, “The Great Reversal”
- 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]
Winners of the 2021 Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article
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.
Winners of the 2021 The Richard A. Peterson Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper
2020 Award Winners
Winner of the 2020 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book
Winner of the 2020 Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article
Hallett, Tim, Orla Stapleton, and Michael Sauder. “Public ideas: Their varieties and careers.” American
Sociological Review 84, no. 3 (2019): 545-576.
Winner of the 2020 Richard A. Peterson Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper
Lindsay J. DePalma (UC, San Diego). “The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences
of the Ideology of ‘Do What You Love.”
Honorable Mention, 2020 Richard A. Peterson Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper
Jeffrey Swindle (University of Michigan). “Pathway of Global Cultural Diffusion: Media and Attitudes about Violence against Women.”
2019 Award Winners
Mary Douglas Award (Best Book)
Clifford Geertz Award (Best Article)
Richard A. Peterson Award (Best Student Paper)
2018 Award Winners
Mary Douglas Award (Best Book)
Co-Winners:
Clayton Childress Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel.
(Princeton, 2017)
And
Bin Xu The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China. (Stanford, 2017)
Clifford Geertz Award (Best Article)
Joosse, Paul. 2017. “Max Weber’s Disciples: Theorizing the Charismatic Aristocracy.” Sociological Theory 35(4): 334-358.
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
Richard A. Peterson Award (Best Student Paper)
Winner: Anya Degenshein, Northwestern University “Strategies of Valuation: Repertoires of Worth at the Financial Margins”
Honorable mention: Lily Liang, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison “No Room for Respectability: Boundary Work in Interaction at a Shanghai Rental”
Honorable mention: Talia Shiff, Northwestern University “Evaluating the Case: Encounters of Schematic Accordance and Discordance in Asylum Adjudications.”
Previous Award Winners
*work in progress*
Mary Douglas Award (Best Book)
Clifford Geertz Award (Best Article)
Richard A. Peterson Award (Best Student Paper)
**Changed from the Suzanne Langer award in 2011.**
section CULTURE 