Please join us in congratulating this year’s award winners. Many thanks to the committees for all their hard work.

Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (Book) Award

• Elizabeth Holzer, The Concerned Women of Buduburam: Refugee Activists and Humanitarian Dilemmas (Cornell University Press), and
• Dingxin Zhao, The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History (Oxford University Press)

Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (Article or Book Chapter) Award

• Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph, “Civic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 120 (3): 798-863
• Honorable Mention: Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tugal, “Political Articulation: The Structured Creativity of Parties,” Pp. 1-35 in Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society, edited by Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tugal (Stanford University Press)

Best Graduate Student Paper Award

• Jeremy Levine (Harvard University), “The Privatization of Political Representation: Community-Based Organizations as Non-elected Neighborhood Representatives,” forthcoming in American Sociological Review

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press.

Hochschild travels deep into a stronghold of the conservative right: Louisiana bayou country—an area on the brink of environmental crisis and suffering from poor health, widespread poverty, and low literacy rates and life expectancy. Her mission: to scale the “empathy wall” and do what so few of us do: trulylisten to the other side in order to understand why they believe—and feel—the way they do.

Over the course of five years, Hochschild situated herself in “red” America: she attends fish fries, gumbo cook-offs, Pentecostal church services and Trump rallies; visits schools, political party groups and oil-soaked wetlands; and engages in long, thoughtful conversations while pouring over photo albums, during card games, and over cookies at kitchen tables. Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that many on the political right have been “duped” into voting against their interests. In the right-wing world she explores, Hochschild discovers powerful forces—fear of cultural eclipse, economic decline, perceived government betrayal—which override self-interest, as progressives see it, and help explain the emotional appeal of a candidate like Donald Trump. Even as Hochschild gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she champions, she discovers surprising common ground in philosophy (belief in fairness and hard work ), in ideas (“let’s get big money out of government,” one Tea Party member tells her) and in policy (“Lets ban the deposit of fracking waste in our nature preserves.”)

For desk and exam copies, please contact Sam Hall.

ASA Rose Series in Sociology, a book series published by the Russell Sage Foundation, is seeking book proposals. The Rose Series publishes cutting-edge, highly visible, and accessible books that offer synthetic analyses of existing fields, challenge prevailing paradigms, and/or offer fresh views on enduring controversies. Books published in the Series reach a broad audience of sociologists, other social scientists, and policymakers. Please submit a 1-page summary and CV to: Lee Clarke, rose.series@sociology.rutgers.edu. For more information, visit http://www.asanet.org/research-publications/rose-series-sociology.

From an interview with the co-editors of the issue:

Evren Savci: We align ourselves with transnational and anti-imperialist feminists who problematize “woman” as a universal category that is assumed to represent shared interests that follow from core elements of experience and existence that are also assumed to be shared among women. The volume brings together key empirical examples from around the world that demonstrate the limitations of such assumptions, and tries to think about alternative epistemologies that will lead to a more promising and relevant feminist politics.

The issue contains contributions by Savina Balasubramanian, Elizabeth Berstein, Jennifer Carlson, Kimberly Hoang, Ann Orloff and Talia Shiff, and Evren Savci, and is available here.

The election results are in and we have a new Chair-Elect and two new Section Council members. Please join us in congratulating

Thomas Janoski (University of Kentucky): Chair-Elect

G. Cristina Mora (UC Berkeley): Section Council

Jennifer Hsu (University of Alberta): Section Council

We look forward to working with you!