The 2017 C. Wright Mills Award Committee selected Dr. Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon's book, Juárez Girls Rising: Transformative Education in Times of Dystopia, University of Minnesota Press, as this year's winner.

Dr. George Lipsitz, Chair of the 2017 C. Wright Mills Award Committee, said of Cervantes-Soon’s work:

Dr. Cervantes-Soon has crafted a fascinating and generative study of how a unique learning community in Ciudad Juȧrez, Mexico enables a group of high school girls to negotiate coming of age in a city plagued by state and vigilante violence, social fragmentation, and misogyny.  In the face of crisis and vulnerability, students and teachers craft pedagogical and curricular innovations that promote self-reflection and self-activity, that deepen capacity for democratic participation by developing a collective sense of reciprocity, respect, responsibility, and relationship.  A shared practice of testimonial discourse equips the students to see their often painful gendered experiences as potential sources of wisdom, and to recognize how their shared stories can serve as steps toward resisting subordination and building solidarity.  Juȧrez Girls Rising delineates the different roles that differentially situated and dispositioned students take on: as refugees from misogyny and violence, as redirectors transforming negative ascription into resistant action, as reinventors turning histories of silence and compliance into a newfound sense of agency, and as redefiners unlearning oppressive images of themselves and of other girls and women.  The book is an exemplary model of principled engaged scholarship and an admirable act of accompaniment with young women in the process of learning that their seemingly personal and private problems have social causes and consequences that require knowledge about social structures and the ability to transform them.

Congratulations, Dr. Cervantes-Soon!

The 2017 award was presented at the 68th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, at the Awards Ceremony on Saturday, August 11, 2018. Click here for a full listing of the 2017 finalists.

Click here for a list of past winners of the C. Wright Mills Award.