Tag Archives: featured

2025 CUSS Award Winners

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Congratulations to our award winners and honorable mentions!

Jane Addams Article Award

Winner: Stephanie Ternullo. 2024. “Place-Based Partisanship: How Place (Re) produces Americans’ Partisan Attachments.” American Journal of Sociology, 130(2), 293-343.

Honorable Mention: Nima Dahir & Jackelyn Hwang. 2025. “Who Owns the Neighborhood? Ethnoracial Composition of Property Ownership and Neighborhood Trajectories in San Francisco”. City & Community, 24(1), 3-25.

Committee: Jan Doering and Christof Brandtner (co-chairs), Emily Walton, Luis Nuño, and Kasey Zapatka.

Book Award

Co-winners:

Randol Contreras (UC Riverside), The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2024.

Stephanie Ternullo (Harvard), How the Heartland went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Honorable mention:

Tony Cheng (Duke), The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input, University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Committee: Tanya Golash Boza (chair), Nate Ela, Jean Lin, Robert Durán, and Janina Selzer

Student Paper Award

Winner: Max Lubell (UT-Austin), “Do Schools Provide a Reprieve from Residential Neighborhood Violence?”

Committee:  Jeremy Levine (chair), Anna Fox, Lacee Satcher, and Jaleh Jalili

Early Career Award

Co-winners: Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana (SUNY Albany) and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn (UNC)

Committee:  Elena Vesselinov (chair), Mervyn Horgan, Jerome Hodos, and Ian Kennedy

Publicly Engaged Research Award

Winner: Esther Sullivan (University of Colorado Denver)

Committee: Jeni Cross (chair), Brandon Alston, Derek Hyra, and Joanne Derouen

Interview w/ Jean Yen-Chun Lin

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Jean Yen-Chun Lin, an Associate Professor at California State University – East Bay, was co-winner of the 2024 Outstanding Book Award. Jean’s innovative research agenda centers on social movements, community organizations, and civic participation. We reached out to ask her to discuss her award-winning book, and we’re including her responses below. Thanks to Jean for participating in our interview series!

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Interview w/ Mario Luis Small

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The 2024 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement in Community and Urban Sociology was awarded to Professor Mario Luis Small. Professor Small is the Chair and Quetelet Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His books include Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice and Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. Among many other awards and honors, Professor Small is a previous winner of both the CUSS awards for best article and best book.   

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Interview w/ Tanya Golash-Boza

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Before Gentrificaiton

Tanya Golash-Boza, a Professor at the University of California – Merced and the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center, was co-winner of the 2024 Outstanding Book Award. Tanya’s innovative research agenda focuses on how racism intersects with capitalism and how the legal system creates and upholds inequities. We reached out to ask her to discuss her award-winning book, and we’re including her responses below. Thanks to Tanya for participating in our interview series!

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Community and Urban Sociology Section Virtual Mini-Conference

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Building Communities in Research and Practice

We are excited to announce a virtual mini-conference giving an opportunity to graduate and postdoctoral students to present their recent scholarly research, network with mentors and each other. There will be one session of concurrent paper presentations, where invited mentors will give feedback to the student presenters. Each paper session will have 4 student presenters at maximum and one invited mentor, who will serve as a presider/discussant. There will also be three professional workshops: (1) Dissertation Workshop, (2) Navigating the Job Market and (3) Publishing, Fellowships, and Grants Workshop.

Date: Friday, April 12, 2024, 12:00 pm – 4:45 pm EST (to accommodate attendees from different time zones).

Registration: Interested students should submit an extended abstract of two pages, with the following clearly marked sections: (1) Introduction to the topic; (2) Hypotheses/Research Questions; (3) Methodology; and (4) Preliminary Results.

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Practitioner Spotlight: Dr. Esther Hio-Tong Castillo

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Dr. Esther Hio-Tong Castillo is the Director of Racial Equity, Storytelling, and Community Impact for the City of Philadelphia. Previously, she served as the Programs Manager for the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University in 2017. Benny Witkovsky interviewed Dr. Castillo about her work in Philadelphia earlier this spring. Thanks for speaking with us! 

Tell me about the work you have done in Philadelphia with the Asian community.

The first time that I worked directly with the Asian community in Philadelphia was when I volunteered as a Census trainer in Chinatown. In late 2019, the City of Philadelphia was recruiting multilingual trainers to ensure that everyone filled out the census, including immigrants and refugees. At that time, I gave a training presentation in Cantonese to about 100 older residents in Chinatown. To my surprise, they were very enthusiastic about filling out the census. Through this experience, I connected with the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC), my former employer. They asked me if I would be willing to lead a program that aims to promote mental health and wellness in the Chinese immigrant community because they just received a grant from the Scattergood Foundation. I said yes. 

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City Spotlight: Landlord Strategies for Avoiding Evictions in Philadelphia

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By Melody L. Boyd (SUNY Brockport) and John Balzarini (Delaware State University)

If it’s been a while since you’ve been to Philadelphia, you’ll notice some shimmering additions to the skyline when you arrive for ASA 2023. You’ll likely need to reroute a block or two to navigate around scaffolding and closed streets as you head to dinner after a day of conferencing. You may want to bring a pair of ear plugs to minimize the construction noise as you move around the city. While Gritty was unveiled in 2018 as the Flyers mascot, the city has gotten quite a bit shinier and new in recent years. Of course, as sociologists we know that shiny and new—which on the surface may seem attractive—actually corresponds with increased inequality as competition for housing intensifies. In the context of these changes throughout the city we conducted research looking at the attitudes, perspectives, and experiences of one of Philadelphia’s most important housing providers—landlords. In this article, we highlight some of our findings from this research, focusing on how landlords navigate evictions amidst an increasingly hot Philly housing market.

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Conference Feature: The Creation of an Elite Civil Society: Civil Society Organization Formation in Los Angeles, 1880-1900

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by Simon Yamawaki Shachter, University of Chicago

CUSS Newsletter Summer 2022, Vol. 35, No. 2

On the United State’s West Coast, in the second half of the 19th century, four small towns grew into large cities: Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco, California; and Los Angeles, California. Despite sharing similar political, economic, and demographic environments, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco developed notably pluralistic and prolific civil societies while Los Angeles’s became relatively smaller and more elite. Through a historical analysis of Los Angeles’s initial growth, I ask the question, why did Los Angeles develop the unique civil society that we still see today?

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