Community and Urban Sociology

Congratulations to all award winners and honorable mentions! The awards ceremony will be held at the section’s reception at the ASA meeting in Montreal.

2024 Community and Urban Sociology Section Award Winners

1. Robert E. Park Book Award (hereafter renamed as the Outstanding Book Award).

This award goes to the author(s) of the best book published in the previous 2 years (2022/2023).

Award Committee:
Co-Chair: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Washington University in St. Louis
Co-Chair: Zachary Levenson, Florida International University
Member 1: Candace Miller, UNC Charlotte
Member 2: Matthew McCleskey, SUNY Oswego
Member 3: Meaghan Stiman, William & Mary

2023-24 Recipients:
Lin, Jean Yen-chun. A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities. Columbia University Press, 2023.
Our first co-winner is Jean Yen-Chun Lin, whose A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities (Columbia University Press, 2023) impressed us greatly with its originality. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, the book explores environmental organizing in five middle-class gated communities in Beijing. Lin skillfully shows how middle-class homeowners develop civic capacity as they navigate and resist waste incinerators near their neighborhoods, a distinct product of a rapidly urbanizing China. Theoretically, the author uses these communities’ experiences to provide insight into some of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century: the environment, urbanization, and democracy.

Golash-Boza, Tanya Maria. Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap. Univ of California Press, 2023.
Our second (equal) co-winner is Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap (University of California Press, 2023). In this careful study of racial inequality in Washington, DC, Golash-Boza deftly builds upon classic gentrification research but goes far beyond this body of work. This book demonstrates that a violent cycle of dispossession, displacement, and disinvestment was followed by racialized reinvestment, which has assumed a largely carceral form. Rather than pro-social investment in essential institutions and services, Black residents of DC were offered prisons as the sole solution to the problems they faced in their communities. This process, Golash-Boza argues, is a crucial prehistory to understanding DC’s recent round of gentrification, which she skillfully narrates in this compelling volume.

Rosa, Vanessa A. Precarious Constructions: Race, Class, and Urban Revitalization in Toronto. UNC Press Books, 2023.
We were also quite impressed with the book we selected for an honorable mention: Rosa, Vanessa A. Rosa’s Precarious Constructions: Race, Class, and Urban Revitalization in Toronto (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Above all, it was the book’s novel approach to the study of urban change that stuck with us. Drawing from interviews, observations of planning meetings, and analysis of planning documents, Rosa reveals how racial and class hierarchies are reproduced in the context of urban revitalization projects in two Toronto neighborhoods. Through an examination of the ways that diversity, surveillance, and consultation are integrated into revitalization activities, Rosa incisively reveals these to be a device of neoliberalism and multiculturalism that ultimately work to maintain settler-colonial capitalism in Canada.

2. Jane Addams Article Award.
The Jane Addams Award (formerly the Park Article Award) goes to author(s) of the best scholarly article in community and urban sociology published in the previous 2 years (2022/2023).

Jane Addams Article Award Committee:
Committee Co-Chair: Prentiss Dantzler, University of Toronto
Committee Co-Chair: Samantha Friedman, University at Albany
Member 1: Shani Evans, Rice University
Member 2: Peter Rich, Cornell University
Member 3: Shelley Kimelberg, University at Buffalo

2023-24 Recipients:
The winner of the Jane Addams article award is:
Christof Brandtner for the article “Green American City: Civic Capacity and the Distributed Adoption of Urban Innovations,” published in 2022 in the American Journal of Sociology.

There were two honorable mentions:
Max Besbris and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn for their article on “Value fluidity and value anchoring: race, intermediaries and valuation in two housing markets,” published in 2023 in Socio-Economic Review.

Samuel Kye for the article “The Rise of Asian Ethnoburbs: A Case of Self Segregation?” published in 2023 in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.

3. Graduate Student Paper Award.
The CUSS Student Paper award goes to the student author of the paper the committee regards as the best graduate student paper in community and urban sociology in the previous 2 years (2022/2023).

Graduate Student Paper Award Committee:
Committee Chair: H. Jacob Carlson, Kean University
Member 1: Whitney Gecker, Macssachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Member 2: Tricia Lewis, Sacred Heart University
Member 3: Brenden Beck, Rutgers University

2023-24 Recipients:
Fox, Anna. “Anti-Black and Blue: Neighborhood Identity and Local Racial Ideologies in Chicago’s Police Neighborhoods”
Our winning paper was by Anna Fox, a grad student at University of Chicago. Their paper was called “Anti-Black and Blue: Neighborhood Identity and Local Racial Ideologies in Chicago’s Police Neighborhoods”. It’s a fascinating mixed-methods paper, where Fox identifies “police neighborhoods” – parts of Chicago where large numbers of officers live. These neighborhoods were identified by linking publicly available police roster data with an Illinois voter file to then geocode the addresses. The main part of the paper is qualitative data based on interviews with 60 “police households” on how they decided to live where they did, and the importance of living in a police neighborhood for them, especially against the backdrop of urban social movements focused on the problems of police violence. It’s a fascinating read that weaves together both the racialization of space as well as how identities and occupations get tied to place.

Gomory, Henry. “The social and institutional contexts underlying landlords’ eviction practices.” Social Forces 100, no. 4 (2022): 1774-1805.
We had an honorable mention paper by Henry Gomory, titled “The Social and Institutional Contexts Underlying Landlords’ Eviction Practices,” published in Social Forces in 2022. Empirically, it’s a pathbreaking paper in its ability to identify landlords behind their LLC companies. It goes beyond that to generate attributes of landlords (small v. large scale; owners who live in the building; corporate legal status; social connections with their tenants, among others), to predict how landlords use eviction. It argues that large scale landlords evict more frequently and over smaller amounts of unpaid rent. It shows how the organizational structure and context of landlords shapes their behavior. It’s very impressive and will be highly cited in the growing sociology of housing field, as well as beyond in housing policy. Gomory is a grad student at Princeton, who will be starting an assistant professor position at USC in the fall.

4. Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement.
This award recognizes distinguished career achievement in community and urban sociology.

Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement Committee:
Committee Chair: Lance Freeman, University of Pennsylvania
Member 1: Brian Levy, George Mason University
Member 2: Raoul Lievanos, University of Oregon
Member 3: Margarethe Kusenbach, University of South Florida

2023-24 Recipient:
The committee has selected Dr. Mario Small for the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Mario Luis Small has made numerous contributions to research on urban neighborhoods, personal networks, qualitative and mixed methods, and many other topics. Broadly, his scholarship has fundamentally changed how we understand neighborhood effects, social capital, and the distribution and quality of organizations/institutions across space. He has shown that poor neighborhoods in commonly studied cities such as Chicago are not representative of low-income neighborhoods everywhere, that how people conceive of their neighborhood shapes how its conditions and how those conditions affect the residents, and that local organizations in poor neighborhoods often broker connections to both people and organizations. Dr. Small has demonstrated that people’s social capital‚ including how many people they know and how much they trust others‚ depends on the organizations in which they are embedded. His work on methods has shown that many practices used to make qualitative research more scientific are ineffective, and he recently published a co-authored book on qualitative literacy for social scientists.

Dr. Small’s work has informed policy and community development work on issues of social capital, childcare centers, nonprofit organizations, and more. He has also testified before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress on social capital and the role of early childcare. Dr. Small’s work has been featured by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Public Radio International, the Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, Greater Good, the Chronicle Review, Commonwealth, and Spotlight on Poverty, among many other outlets.

5. CUSS Excellence in Teaching in Community and Urban Sociology Award
This award recognizes members who are outstanding teachers in the field.

CUSS Excellence in Teaching Award Committee:
Committee Chair: Albert Fu, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Member 1: Judith Halasz, SUNY New Paltz
Member 2: Zawadi Rucks Ahidiana, University at Albany
Member 3: Colleen Wynn, University of Indianapolis

2023-24 Recipient:
Azat Zana Gündoğan, Florida State University
The committee had the pleasure of reviewing a wide range of stellar nominations. While several are worthy of the award, Azat’s nomination stood out to us for a number of reasons. He is currently an Associate Teaching Professor in the University Honors Program and holds Affiliate Faculty status in the Sociology Department at Florida State University. In his role, he has built up a diverse portfolio of urban-oriented courses and has been involved in co-curricular activities in the honors program. This ranges from speakers to workshops that support student learning. We were also impressed with his emphasis on pedagogy and supporting students. Student letters noted his, “innovative teaching methods, passion for the topic, and uniquely interdisciplinary focus.” Another letter highlighted Dr. Gündoğan’s helping the student “appreciate the learning process itself.”