2026 Student Paper Competition Winning Abstracts
Congratulations to the student paper competition winners and honorable mentions! The student paper competition awards are proudly sponsored by the Divisions.
CONFLICT, SOCIAL ACTION, AND CHANGE DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Role Collapse: The Israeli Settler–State Compact and Pathways to Hybrid Domination in the Occupied West Bank”
Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: jweinger@ucla.edu
Abstract:
This article examines how contemporary Israeli state and settler violence in the Occupied West Bank is co-produced through the collapse of institutionalized role boundaries. Drawing on original ethnographic data, it develops a pragmatist account of role collapse to describe how the distinctions between civilian, military, and bureaucratic actors become blurred, enabling both systematic and opportunistic violence. The paper identifies four relational pathways of role collapse: collaboration, complicity, commissioning, and commandeering. It explains these pathways by identifying the confluence of mechanisms—realignment and functional substitution, hybridization, normative convergence, and ambiguation—that account for the dynamic ways in which roles become fused, reassigned, or rendered illegible. Together, these dynamics produce a hybrid regime of domination in which bureaucratic order and extralegal force are mutually reinforcing. The improvisational alignments of role collapse accelerate coercive territorial redistribution and diminish the threshold for the instrumentalization of violence.
Honorable Mention: “Nothing about Us without Us? Allyship, Collective Identity, and Leadership in the Movement to Abolish Life without Parole Sentencing”
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Affiliation: University of California, Irvine
E-mail: kweymout@uci.edu
Abstract:
This article examines how people who are directly impacted by a social movement’s focal issue work with allies to advocate for change. I argue that, even in the absence of overt conflict, divergent understandings of whether movement identities are inherent or achieved make it difficult for allies and directly impacted activists to collaborate effectively in developing strategy. I draw on twenty-three interviews and participant observation with members of Parole for All, a coalition working to end life without parole (LWOP) sentencing. While allies treat identities in Parole for All as inherent to one’s lived experience with LWOP, directly impacted members instead view these identities as achieved through movement work. As a result, allies are often unwilling to contribute to leadership in ways that are desired by directly impacted members and would benefit the coalition. This study advances theorization of how collective identity shapes interactions between allies and directly impacted members.
CRIME AND JUSTICE DIVISION
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Winning Title: “State Data and the Production of Quantitative Knowledge: The Case of Police Stops in the United States and France”
Affiliation: Harvard University
E-mail: michael_zangertishler@g.harvard.edu
Abstract:
State administrative data are increasingly used to create quantitative knowledge about bureaucratic behavior and social inequality. Using the case of police stop data in the U.S. and France, this paper theorizes the critical role administrative data play in shaping knowledge, sometimes in unexpected ways. Based on 210 interviews with bureaucrats, researchers, journalists, and activists in the U.S. and France, I show how the availability of administrative data about police stops influences the development of knowledge about these practices. In the U.S., police stop microdata have influenced policy and generated extensive knowledge but have limited the questions researchers ask. By contrast, the lack of administrative stop data in France has led external actors to generate their own data via surveys and observations. While this has in some ways hampered research on police stops, it has empowered actors to address topics like national origin and race that are typically invisible in official French data.
CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDY DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Becoming More Chinese: How Ethnic Identity is Made through Practice”
Affiliation: Columbia University
E-mail: charlotte.xuelian.wang@gmail.com
Abstract:
This article shows how ethnoracial identities are made to feel essential by analyzing the practices people engage in to close a perceived gap between their own experiences and the identity categories to which they are meant to belong. I build on institutional and exclusion-centric explanations of ethnic persistence by using the concept of ethnic sincerity to examine the subjective understandings of racialized subjects. Drawing on 78 interviews with American respondents who have Chinese ancestry and 16 months of participant observation at cultural events and ancestry tours, I outline three types of practices through which people achieve a deeply held sense of ethnic selfhood: 1) Incorporation of “Chinese” practices into embodied selves, 2) Affiliation with co-ethnic individuals and groups, and 3) Imaginal relationships to ancestors and places. These practices reproduce Chinese identities from within ethnic boundaries by transforming the emotional experience of ethnoracial identity. They also strengthened co-ethnic networks and raised the salience of ethnic identities across contexts, leading to more “consequential” experiences of ethnic identity.
EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Missing the Boat: Social Class and Extracurriculars in the Elite Education-to-Employment Pipeline”
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: joycek@sas.upenn.edu
Abstract:
Research has shown how undergraduates’ class backgrounds shape their college experience, but less is known about how social class shapes students’ career pathways, particularly at elite institutions. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with students from different class backgrounds at an elite university, this study examines unequal access to preprofessional extracurricular clubs, which can confer a crucial advantage in securing elite finance, consulting, and tech (FCT) jobs. Entry into these clubs, a peer-led process that typically occurs early in students’ college experience, provides a key edge, offering networks and training to meet the accelerated pace of FCT job recruitment. Compared with their middle-class peers, first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students report challenges joining these exclusive clubs, which can contribute to “missing the boat” for elite jobs down the line. This study thus holds theoretical implications for how the timing of head starts matters for cumulative advantage, shaping inequalities in the FCT education-to-employment pipeline.
Honorable Mention: “Racialized Framing in Higher Education Policy: A Case Study from Florida”
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Affiliation: University of Central Florida
E-mail: annie.jones@ucf.edu
Abstract:
This paper assesses if and how the state of Florida borrows framing tactics from dominant racial ideologies in public discourse to justify and garner support for anti-woke higher education policies. Through qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis of Florida House Bill 7, Senate Bill 266, and 3 related press releases, findings reveal that the state of Florida uses Racialized Framing tactics (Carter and Lippard 2020) in creating and discussing anti-woke higher education policies. Racialized Framing combines colorblind narratives (Bonilla-Silva 2003) and racialized threat frames (Blumer 1958), creating racialized omission through organizational means (Ray 2019). In particular, the policies and press releases rely on abstract liberal concepts of individualism, meritocracy, and objectivity to construct an idealized version of the education system. Additionally, Florida argues that the current way we organize higher education poses a threat of reverse racism to students, prompting a need to “fight back” with concepts like parents’ rights. These findings align with contemporary work in race and racism, finding Racialized Framing a primary technique for justifying racialized omission at the state-level (Carter and Lippard 2020).
ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY DIVISION
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Winning Title: “‘The Dead River Is Killing Us’: Environmental Risk and Reproductive Decision-Making in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast”
Affiliation: The University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: mxdavila@utexas.edu
Abstract:
This article offers a temporal theory of environmental reproductive risk by examining how water contamination transforms women’s relationship to reproduction and motherhood in rural Colombia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast and in-depth interviews with women living near contaminated water sources, I analyze how environmental harm and gendered meanings of reproduction become entangled through three temporal processes: bodily documentation of pollution, anticipatory reproductive decision-making, and navigation of conflicting temporal demands between immediate survival and long-term wellbeing. Women’s experiences of infections in their reproductive organs, miscarriages, and reproductive health problems not only create collective knowledge about contamination that challenges mainstream narratives about environmental safety but also reconfigure motherhood and reproduction as inherently risky endeavors. Their reproductive decisions—whether to avoid pregnancy, seek abortions, or attempt to mother under toxic conditions—become strategic responses to environmental risk that extend beyond individual health concerns to encompass broader forms of reproductive precarity. This study demonstrates how women’s bodies become sites where environmental risk is perceived, interpreted, and managed through reproductive practices. By examining the temporal dimensions of environmental reproductive harm, this analysis extends theories of embodiment and reproductive decision-making while revealing how toxic environments create sophisticated forms of gendered risk navigation.
FAMILY, AGING, AND YOUTH DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Earning Money the Hard Way: Former Seasonal Farmworker Youth’s Entry into Labor as Precarity Management”
Affiliation: University of California, Irvine
E-mail: natalcg1@uci.edu
Abstract:
Intensive labor is considered an adverse experience that youth should be protected from in models of priceless childhood and normal adolescence (Allen 2012; Zelizer 1985). Nonetheless, labor regulations have historically allowed youth to labor in the agricultural sector. I expand research about child labor in agriculture by addressing why farmworker youth enter the workplace. I draw from 78 interviews conducted with former farmworker youth, adults who worked in the fields during childhood and adolescence, from the California Central Coast. I argue that youth enter into the agricultural fields to manage financial and social precarities. I offer three categories of farmworker youth to explain their methods of managing precarity: (1) Mutual Care Farmworkers, (2) Family Support Farmworkers, and (3) Pocket Money Farmworkers. These categories are not mutually exclusive. This research expands our growing understanding of childhood and adolescence by recognizing what it is like to grow up in a marginalized community on the basis of class and immigration status. This paper highlights the various forms of precarity that limit access to education and exploration experiences assumed to be integral to youth.
Honorable Mention: “Reframing Adolescent Children of Sex Workers as Care Receivers and Caregivers Using the Southern Feminist Lens of Deep Care”
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Affiliation: University of Calgary
E-mail: anuneeta.chatterjee@ucalgary.ca
Abstract:
In this paper, I use a Southern feminist epistemology to critically appraise the discourse around children of sex workers framed as non-agentic subjects of the State and NGO care. I subvert this gaze and show how the adolescent children of sex workers in an Indian city present a care paradox as they are both subjects of care and emerge as young carers within their families and in their kinship contexts. This is both an empirical and theoretical intervention in the literature on children of sex workers, which primarily centers on their vulnerabilities, stigmatization, and discrimination, as well as the literature on the mothering of sex workers that frames them as deficit mothers. The deep care perspective reorients the construction of care as a linear relationship of ‘giving’ by mothers to their children to instead focus on the symbiotic relationship of providing and receiving care and acknowledgment between adolescent children and their mothers under the circumstances of poverty, stigma, and gendered and caste violence. This study is based on 16 in-depth interviews from the red-light areas of Kalighat and Bowbazar neighborhoods in Kolkata, India. Using the Southern marginal feminist perspective of deep care, I center the voices of adolescent children of sex workers whose experiences are shaped by the intersection of class, caste, and religious marginality, parental social status, as well as gender discrimination, which have been muted in academic and policy discourses.
GENDER, SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, POLITICS, AND COMMUNITIES DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Strategizing Gender: Experiences of Transmasculine Folk with Police and Security Forces in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires”
Affiliation: The University of Chicago
E-mail: fjfabre@uchicago.edu
Abstract:
In 2012, Argentina’s Gender Identity Law established self-determination as the sole criterion for legal gender recognition; however, this identity-based framework coexists with enduring biological and cultural criteria for gender determination within government institutions and in social interactions. Drawing on 22 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with transmasculine people in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, this article examines how they navigate these competing frameworks in interactions with police, a central institution in the everyday regulation of gender in public space. Identifying threat as a central element in both police criminalization and the social recognition of masculinity, I show how racialization and class shape the gendered archetypes through which respondents’ gender is assessed by police. Through practices that invoke legal protections or delegitimize their perceived threat, transmasculine people negotiate identity, embodiment, and safety. Some transmasculine people leverage both the legal designation of women as protected subjects and their designation as vulnerable identities to de-escalate police interactions. On the other hand, recognition as transgender can neutralize perceptions of threatening masculinity and render police action institutionally risky, but it can also expose respondents to mockery or corrective violence. In a global context of escalating anti-trans sentiment and restrictions on bodily autonomy, these embodied experiences under Argentina’s Gender Identity Law illustrate the complexities of both the promise and the limits of rights-based legislation.
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Winning Title: “Bounded Desirability: How Anti-Blackness Shapes Interracial Intimacy among and between Queer Men of Color”
Affiliation: University of California, Davis
E-mail: jyunjieyang@gmail.com
Abstract:
While studies have examined how race and racism operate in interracial intimacy between Whites and non-Whites, we still know little about how they influence interracial dating patterns between two non-White individuals with non-normative sexuality. Drawing on 33 interviews with queer men of color, this research investigates how anti-Blackness shapes their dating experiences and the resulting unintended consequences. I argue that anti-Blackness does not simply involve liking or disliking Black men. Rather, it manifests through multiple racial boundary formations that hinder the relational opportunities for sex and dating among and between them. I find these boundaries operate in three dimensions: 1) boundaries selectively screen what Black masculinity is perceived as sexually (un)desirable; 2) boundaries reflect public expectations that police dating Black men as socially (un)acceptable; and 3) boundaries along Black/non-Black and White/non-White color lines determine what interracial desires are spatially (un)accessible. These boundaries, intertwined with race, sexuality, gender, and class, are embodied by their selective, avoidant, and fugitive dating practices, further reproducing group divisions and the loss of sexual capital among queer men of color. To understand the construction of desirability among racial and sexual minorities, I offer “matrix of boundary-making” to conceptualize how they navigate non-White intimacy and sexual politics.
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Honorable Mention: “Codifying Binaries: Moral Entrepreneurs and Anti-Transgender Legislation in U.S. State Legislatures Between 2018–2024”
Affiliation: The Ohio State University
E-mail: schenk.67@buckeyemail.osu.edu and wippell.1@osu.edu
Abstract:
Amid an escalating moral panic over transgender rights in the U.S., state legislation has emerged as a central site of symbolic struggle. This study examines the moral framing of 865 U.S. state level bills targeting transgender rights between 2018–2024. Drawing on moral panic theory and social movement scholarship, we use an augmented Moral Foundations Dictionary to quantify moral language in legislative texts. We find a marked rise in moralized—especially vice-laden—language over time, concentrated in education and healthcare bills. We also find evidence for the strategic invocation of moralized language based on demographic but not political structures. Contrary to initial expectations, we find that vice-based rhetoric significantly reduces the likelihood of bill passage, suggesting a tradeoff between symbolic grandstanding and legislative success. These findings highlight how moral panics focused on gender minorities emerge in the legislative arena and, similarly, how political elites strategically amplify and legitimate cultural anxieties. In so doing, our study speaks to a core contention at the intersection of gender, culture, and politics in the contemporary U.S., showing how anti-transgender legislation functions not merely as policy but also as a vehicle for the symbolic enforcement of traditional gender norms.
Keywords: Anti-transgender, moral panic, framing, social movements, text analysis
Honorable Mention: “‘Comphet Is Ableism’s Next-Door Neighbor’: #Neuroqueer Counterdiscourses on TikTok”
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Abstract:
Despite growing scholarship on the intersection of gender, sexuality, and neurodivergence, little is known about the emerging identity of “neuroqueer” that is being deployed on social media by people who self-identify as both queer and neurodivergent. A critical discourse analysis of 40 TikTok videos demonstrates that neuroqueer individuals are circulating counterdiscourses that resist normative cultural scripts about gender, sexuality, and neurological ability. Within these discursive practices are what I call counter-counterdiscourses that critique the overrepresentation of neuroqueer content creators who are white, revealing a racialized hierarchy of representation. Through these counter-counterdiscourses, I argue that visibility operates as a stratifying mechanism even within marginalized spaces, complicating assumptions of shared resistance and solidarity in digital counterpublics.
GLOBAL DIVISION
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Winning Title: “From Women’s Gold to Men’s Market: Global Value Chains and Evolving Traditions in Nigeria’s Shea Economy”
Affiliation: Wayne State University
E-mail: idowu.o.a@wayne.edu
Abstract:
Although the benefits of integrating indigenous resources into international markets are well documented, less is known about how such action transforms local socio-cultural, economic and environmental systems governing them. This article examines how the global commodification of Shea, a resource historically embedded in women's socioeconomic and cultural reproduction, reshapes gender relations, cultural meanings, and environmental practices in rural Nigeria. Based on 32 interviews with resource users, informal leaders, and state actors, the analysis investigates how expanding markets reshape local practices and Shea value chain. Findings show that as commercial demands for Shea continue to increase, men increasingly enter the industry and concentrate in higher-profit activities, particularly bulk trading and exports. This shift further restructures gendered divisions of labor, intensifies competition over the resource, and generates tensions. It also accelerates Shea tree cutting linked to charcoal production for export markets. Overall, the findings demonstrate that global commercialization actively transforms local economic and gender relations rather than mere interactions with existing cultures. The article contributes to feminist and global value chain scholarship by showing how embodied labor shapes and is reshaped by commodity-chain dynamics. It concludes by advocating gender-responsive and fair-trade frameworks that recognize women's labor as central to more equitable value chains.
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Honorable Mention: “Lessons from the Peripheries: Resistance among U.S. Territorial Peoples”
Affiliation: Arizona State University
E-mail: sionelister@asu.edu
Abstract:
The US territories—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guåhan, and American Sāmoa—remain permanently subordinated under US rule. Governed through legal frameworks of unincorporation, these places are denied full sovereignty while granted limited mobility and partial political recognition. Territorial migrants occupy distinct social, political, and legal positions that often set their experiences apart from their larger panethnic migrant communities, yet their experiences remain underexamined in US sociology. This article draws on interviews with Sāmoans, Puerto Ricans, and Virgin Islanders to examine how colonial legacies shape citizen-subject belonging and everyday life. I explore how participants navigate structural neglect, legal ambiguity, and cultural displacement, and how they cultivate practices of care, refusal, and political engagement in response. Together, their accounts illuminate how people living at the periphery imagine and enact alternative futures both beyond and within the nation-state.
HEALTH, HEALTH POLICY, AND HEALTH SERVICES DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Social Vulnerability and COVID-19 Vaccination Rates: A Comparative Analysis across U.S. States and Counties”
Affiliation: University at Buffalo, SUNY
E-mail: tlin53@buffalo.edu
Abstract:
Structural inequalities have long shaped access to health-protective resources, yet how specific social vulnerability dimensions differentially affect health behavior adoption remains underexplored. This study examines county-level COVID-19 vaccination uptake across the United States as of June 2021, a critical juncture when vaccine supply was widely available yet structural barriers to uptake remained salient. Grounded in Fundamental Cause Theory (FCT) and a spatial-structural framework, we analyze data from 2,856 U.S. counties (excluding Texas, Connecticut and Hawaii) using descriptive analysis, spatial analysis, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to examine how the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and its four thematic dimensions predicted vaccination rates. Results reveal that the aggregate negative association between social vulnerability and vaccination masks divergent underlying mechanisms: socioeconomic status and household characteristics dimensions functioned as significant access barriers, while racial and minority status emerged as a robust positive predictor that persisted net of urban density and area-level SES, possibly reflecting the concentrated impact of targeted federal interventions and community mobilization in high-minority areas. In addition, rural status remained a consistent negative predictor, reflecting spatial disadvantages in vaccine distribution infrastructure. These findings extend FCT to the county level, demonstrating that structural disadvantage need not be deterministic when specific policy designs actively counteract it. Future pandemic preparedness should integrate decentralized distribution with community-based mobilization to ensure equitable access before demand erosion sets in. |
Honorable Mention: “Health Insurance Patterns and the Transition to Adulthood in the United States”
Affiliation: University at Buffalo
E-mail: krdalfon@buffalo.edu
Abstract:
There is growing inequality in the transition to adulthood, and access to health insurance may be one source of that inequality. Through age 26, young people can access parents’ health insurance if their parents have coverage; after that, the parental safety net is gone. For individuals without parental support or family health insurance resources, a parental safety net during this period never existed. Despite this, health insurance among young adults is understudied. This article sets out to identify patterns of health insurance status across the transition to adulthood and assess structured inequality in those patterns. I ask two questions: (1) What are the patterns of health insurance presence and type (e.g., public or private) during the transition to adulthood? and (2) To what extent do these patterns vary by social location (e.g., race, gender, and parent education) and adult transitions (e.g., marriage, education)? To test these associations, I conduct multinomial logistic regression using the Transition to Adulthood Supplement and the Individual-Level files from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. I find that the most common pattern across emerging adulthood is instability in coverage, marked by either (a) inconsistent health insurance coverage or (b) switching the types of plans during a time of continuous insurance. Among young adults, group differences were predictable by race, gender, and class. This work is in line with the transition to adulthood literature and contributes to health insurance status as another source of structured instability.
Keywords: Health insurance, young adulthood, instability, life course
INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY DIVISION
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Winning Title: “‘Reading for Social Organization’ in Music Students’ Health Research: What Institutional Ethnography Makes Visible”
Affiliation: University of Ottawa
E-mail: jsabo010@uottawa.ca
Abstract:
Evidence suggests that post-secondary music students suffer from high rates of health conditions and have poor engagement in health-related behaviours. Despite longstanding efforts to address music students’ health problems, prevalence rates remain high, and interventions have struggled to induce long-term behaviour changes. Few studies have investigated how students’ work and health are organized by their institution, and doing so may require adopting methods that are outside standard health research practices. Institutional ethnography (IE) has been proposed as one such method for generating health-related knowledge about post-secondary music institutions. IE researchers often collect qualitative data, but authors regularly contrast IE analysis with qualitative methods that objectify individuals or abstract their experiences into reified concepts. These distinctions are essential to IE’s usefulness as a methodological approach, but they also pose challenges for novice IE researchers, perhaps because few published examples directly compare IE’s analytical process to that of other methods applied to similar data. This article examines three published studies that employed qualitative methods to study post-secondary musicians’ health. It illustrates how interview excerpts in each article were analyzed by abstracting the experiences of music students to draw health-related conclusions. It then explains how those analytic practices can obscure students’ activities and the institutional processes organizing them. Each article’s method is then contrasted with an IE approach, using interview data collected during a broader IE study. This article provides concrete examples comparing IE analysis to more commonly used methods. It also demonstrates how IE can elucidate less-studied aspects of music students’ health that may be important for improving health outcomes.
Honorable Mention: “At All Costs: Testifying for Housing Justice through Canada’s Federal Human Rights Review Panels”
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Affiliation: University of Toronto Scarborough
E-mail: ae.nelson@utoronto.ca
Abstract:
Drawing on autoethnographic research conducted between 2021-2025, this article uses the tools of institutional ethnography (IE) to examine the role of lived knowledge and lived experience participation in Canada’s first two federal right to housing review panels established through the 2019 National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA). This analysis highlights the “counter-narratives” that emerge from the everyday work of advocating from lived experience of housing precarity and intersecting marginalization within institutional settings and governmental processes. Drawing from autoethnographic reflection, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis of written and oral review panel hearings, this article demonstrates how lived knowledge can disrupt and contextualize institutional narratives that otherwise reinforce logics of power and domination enabling financialization of housing. In doing so, this article contributes to scholarship on housing systems and human rights advocacy by depicting how accountability mechanisms become sites where ruling relations are encountered and resisted by impacted communities.
LABOR STUDIES DIVISION
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Harry Braverman Graduate Student Paper Award Winner: “Organizational Tacitness and Gendered Risks: Cultural Matching Reexamined”
Affiliation: Harvard University
E-mail: yinanwang@g.harvard.edu and fyildirim@g.harvard.edu
Abstract:
Cultural matching is central to explanations of labor market stratification, yet far less is known about its organizational and gendered consequences beyond the hiring phase. We investigate how presumed cultural alignment structures workplace norms and inequalities using the case of sex toy companies, where sex positivity is treated as a shared and self-evident value. Drawing on interviews with individuals who work in sex toy and sexual wellness companies, we argue that presumed cultural consensus generates organizational tacitness: a condition in which cultural expectations are treated as self-evident and remain unformalized, leading organizations to rely on unspoken norms rather than explicit rules to regulate behavior. In this context, sex positive ideals were taken as intuitive, leading to a set of tacit expectations and assumptions about professionalism in the workplace. Furthermore, a lack of clear guidelines for navigating sexualized interactions leaves employees to determine appropriate conduct, rely on subtle cues to interpret boundaries, and manage interpersonal dynamics. We find that this tacit governance obscures institutional responsibility, devolving the burden of boundary-setting and risk management to individual workers. Consequently, women are disproportionately saddled with additional emotional and cognitive labor, increasing their susceptibility to harassment. Our analysis reveals how presumed cultural alignment can ultimately reproduce and reinforce gendered and sexualized inequalities.
LAW AND SOCIETY DIVISION
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Winning Title: “‘Money Instead of Change’: How Civil Compensation for Police Violence Shapes Litigants’ Views of the State”
Affiliation: Princeton University
E-mail: solome.haile@princeton.edu
Abstract:
In the U.S., roughly 50 to 60 million members of the public have some contact with the police each year. Sociolegal scholars have documented the ramifications of these encounters with the police, especially in instances of misconduct, for people’s understanding of the law and legal actors—i.e., their legal consciousness. However, this research has been limited to the discrete encounter with and residents’ perceptions of the police. In this study, I extend the timeline (i.e., actions following an instance of police misconduct) and target (i.e., beyond the police to the state and its governance) of the legal consciousness literature. To do this, I draw upon interviews with litigants about their experiences suing the police and municipality for infringing upon their civil rights, situating their accounts as sites for theorizing the formative role these suits can have in shaping the (re)making of their legal consciousness. In doing so, I shift the focus of sociolegal scholarship to an integral set of legal actions and implications of police misconduct that researchers have otherwise overlooked.
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Alfred R. Lindesmith Graduate Student Paper Award Honorable Mention: “Therapeutic Retribution: When Offender Punishment Becomes Victim Care in Progressive Prosecution”
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: akrf@berkeley.edu
Abstract:
Progressive prosecution has emerged as a reformist project aimed at using prosecutorial discretion to reduce racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system. Yet sex crimes remain conspicuously exempt from such progressive reforms. Drawing on 46 in-depth interviews with officials in District Attorney and U.S. Attorney offices in California who have worked on sex crime cases, this article examines why officials who otherwise espouse progressive values consistently adopt punitive approaches in sex crime cases. I develop the concept of therapeutic retribution to capture the legitimizing mechanism through which state officials narrate punishment of offenders as care for victims. State officials cast themselves as advocates who correct the sexism that once silenced female victims, while also portraying sex crimes as morally unambiguous and politically neutral. This narration reimagines punitive prosecution in sex crime cases as social justice work, and therefore progressive. However, in presenting sex crimes as uniquely heinous and politically neutral, state officials obscure racialized operations of state power and reaffirm the legitimacy of punitive control. By analyzing this carve-out within progressive prosecution, this study advances sociological understandings of how states mobilize discourses of care to sustain the legitimacy of punitive authority and reproduce inequality.
POVERTY, CLASS, AND INEQUALITY DIVISION
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Graduate Student Paper Award Winner: “Beyond Little House on the Prairie: How the Myth of ‘Real America’ Shapes Rural Broadband Policy and Digital Inequality”
Affiliation: West Texas A&M University
E-mail: DR.ANDY.KRAUS@GMAIL.COM
Abstract:
Federal rural broadband policy assumes infrastructure deployment enables digital governance and reduces rural-urban service divides. This study tested whether broadband infrastructure, household adoption, socioeconomic factors, or organizational capacity explain e-government variation in 45 rural municipalities (populations 2,000-15,000) across Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico. A Municipal Website Functionality Index measured e-government capacity across information access, transactions, and integration. OLS regression analyzed relationships between website functionality and infrastructure availability, broadband adoption, income, education, and population using Census Bureau, FCC, and American Community Survey data. Population was the sole significant predictor (B = 0.002, p < .001, Beta = .559), with every 1,000 residents predicting 2 additional functionality points. Infrastructure availability, adoption rates, income, and education showed no significant relationships (all p > .20). Results remained robust across interaction tests and state-specific models. Findings challenge infrastructure-focused assumptions underlying the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act's $65 billion investment. Infrastructure deployment is necessary but insufficient without parallel capacity-building investments. Small municipalities lack the administrative scale for specialized IT functions regardless of connectivity. Policy should emphasize regional cooperation, state platforms, and technical assistance alongside infrastructure.
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Graduate Student Paper Award Honorable Mention: “‘Like a House Fire Every Week’: Urban Homelessness Management and the Dispossession of Life-Affirming Belongings”
Affiliation: University of Southern California
E-mail: ng73047@usc.edu
Abstract:
Encampment sweeps have become a defining feature of how U.S. cities like Los Angeles regulate public space and manage unsheltered homelessness. While prior research has focused on the loss of life-sustaining belongings (e.g., food, tents, medications) during sweeps, this article highlights the dispossession of life-affirming belongings, such as pets, family mementos, and hobby items. Drawing on in-depth interviews with encampment residents and mutual aid organizers in Los Angeles, California (n=24), I examine how the routine dispossession of these belongings is rationalized by City agents, operationalized through interagency coordination, and experienced as a form of spatial and social control. I introduce the concept of “life-affirming belongings” to capture how such items shape one’s sense of identity, purpose, dignity, and connection to place and others. Their loss compounds material deprivation with psychosocial devastation—fracturing social ties, eroding resilience, and deepening civic exclusion. I frame encampment sweeps as unnatural disasters: City-orchestrated disruptions that cyclically displace, dispossess, and demoralize unsheltered residents under the guise of public health and safety. I conclude with non-punitive, dignity-centered policy recommendations aimed at reducing reliance on destructive sweeps and upholding the right of all Angelenos to remain and thrive in the city.
SOCIAL PROBLEMS THEORY DIVISION
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Winning Title: “A Framework for Ongoing Settler Colonialism Rooted in Indigenous Sociology”
Affiliation: University of Missouri; Charles Eastman Fellow, Dartmouth College
E-mail: melissa.m.horner@gmail.com
Abstract:
Although U.S. settler colonialism is an ongoing social structure that organizes nearly every segment of U.S. society, the field of sociology has largely been remiss in exploring its existence and mechanisms. Building from interdisciplinary settler colonial theory and grounded in Indigenous sociological perspectives, the essay introduces the “Cornerstones of Ongoing Settler Colonialism” as a framework for examining how settler colonialism 1) attempts to eliminate Indigenous Peoples, 2) normalizes colonial property regimes, 3) produces anti-relationality, and 4) constrains imagined social possibilities. The framework provides a lens for analyzing micro- and macro-level dynamics across U.S. society. A settler colonial analysis of suicide serves as an anchoring example to demonstrate the framework’s analytic utility. The essay offers avenues for integrating a settler colonial framework and Indigenous perspectives into sociological theory, research, and pedagogy to strengthen the discipline’s capacity to address intertwined forms of domination and support anti/decolonial futures.
SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL WORK, AND SOCIAL WELFARE DIVISION
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Winning Title: “Symbolic Violence in the Privatization of U.S. Public Housing”
Affiliation: University at Buffalo
E-mail: gracesem@buffalo.edu
Abstract:
Privatization in the U.S. public housing industry subjected social service recipients to the profit-driven interests of the private sector. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the American state and capitalist market entered into a dynamic relationship. While the New Deal regime introduced large-scale housing assistance for the poor, the end of the century saw a shift to private ownership of what were once publicly-funded services. Simultaneously, the federal government institutionalized the selective encouragement of homeownership among its citizens, segregating black residents into inner-city ghettos where the hands of privatization were becoming more exploitative. Private ownership of what was designed to be publicly-funded housing for low-income Americans grants individual landlords, firms, real estate developers, and financial institutions the ability to profit off of public housing residents’ vulnerability. I argue that the neoliberal turn toward privatization in American public housing is symbolically violent as it routinized the experience of scarcity and precarity for many American public housing recipients. More scholarly attention should be devoted to understanding precarious housing not as a static outcome or set of dependent variables, but in the context of state- and market-led processes bound within complex webs of power and capital.
