ASA-NSF Small Grants Awarded

by Roberta Spalter-Roth, Research on the Discipline and the Profession

The American Sociological Association (ASA) is pleased to announce six awards from the summer 2002 review cycle of the Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (FAD). The Association administers the FAD program, which is jointly funded through a matching grant provided to the ASA by the National Science Foundation (NSF). These awards are designed to provide scholars with seed money for innovative research projects and also for scientific conferences that show promise for advancing research in the discipline. The winter 2002 round of winners includes:

Marjorie L. DeVault, Syracuse University, $7,000 for “Embodied Workers in the New Economy.” Funding is for a conference that will bring together distinguished senior scholars, mid-level scholars, and graduate students to develop Institutional Ethnographic (IE) approaches for studying the workings of economic restructuring and its effects on workers who are treated as though they are disembodied. IE approaches examine how embodied workers (including the deaf, blind, and disabled) fare within the governing, textually based organizational technologies, practices, and schemes of accountability. Some examples of technology and practices include case records, databases, flow charts, and management theory. The conference will include an open plenary session, a website for paper posting and discussions, topic-based meetings of conference participants, and proposal writing sessions. All conference participants will address common questions including how particular groups of workers sustain labor force participation, and how institutional contexts support or inhibit labor force participation. The result of this conference will be proposals for more institutional ethnographies.

Yanyi K. Djamba, Southeastern Louisiana University, $6,990 for “Poverty, Sexuality, and AIDS in Africa.” Funding is being used for a study of why AIDS is spreading among young women in Zambia. The study tests two alternative hypotheses. The first emphasizes women’s poverty and their need to exchange sex with older men for gifts of material goods, and the second emphasizes the type of kinship system. The Principal Investigator suggests that those in matrilineal clans have more control over their sexuality and are less likely to participate in “risky” sexual behavior. Face-to-face interviews with 400 young women will be conducted to test the study’s hypothesis. Multivariate analysis will be employed to determine the relative impact of the young women’s economic situations, kinship system, and other socio-demographic variables. The results of this study should provide systematic information on the factors related to sexual behavior among young women and should shed light on the conditions for the spread of AIDS.

Nazli Kibria, Boston University, $7,000 for “Islam and Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora.” Funding is for the fist stage of a larger study of the social forces that shape identity formation among Bangladeshi migrants to four different countries—two Muslim (Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates) and two non-Muslim (the United States and Britain). The purpose of the study is to better understand how ethnic and religious identity are produced—in social interaction with people of similar religious identity versus in social interaction with “other” groups—by examining the “lived experience” of these groups of Bangladeshi. Specific questions include: (1) whether Muslims in the United States will become the “new blacks” as opposed to becoming assimilated like earlier groups, and (2) how they express their Muslim identity. Face-to-face interviews with 10 migrants will be conducted at each site as will interviews with family members remaining in Bangladesh. The study will shed light on how encounters with the “other,” under a variety of circumstances, shape identity and whether a heterogeneous rather than a homogeneous Islamic identity is created.

Charis Kubrin, George Washington University, $3,250 for “Predicting Who Offends: The Neglected Role of Neighborhood Context in Recidivism Studies.” Funding is for a study that investigates the interaction between neighborhood-level and individual-level characteristics to better understand recidivism among individuals on probation in an Oregon county. The Principal Investigator hypothesizes that those living in socially disorganized areas are more likely to reoffend while on probation when individual-level characteristics are taken into account. Data on reoffenders on probation in the year 2000, from the Oregon Department of Corrections, will be merged with census tract data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. HLM models will be used to test the interaction effects between neighborhood disorganization, individual characteristics, and recidivism. The study will shed light on why those on probation reoffend.

Gale Largey, Mansfield University, $7,000 for “Lester Frank Ward, the Founder of American Sociology.” Funding is for a 60- to 90-minute documentary of the life and ideas of Lester Frank Ward, the first president of the American Sociological Society (now the ASA). Ward was an internationally recognized scholar, an outspoken proponent for the application of scientific sociology to improve society, a foremost critic of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement, and a supporter of women’s rights and expanded educational opportunities. The documentary will be in narrative form and will include images of Ward and images and music of the time as it makes known Ward’s early roots, and his opposition to slavery, views of sociology as a science, critiques of laissez faire views of government, ideas about women’s rights, advocacy for public education, and views on religion. The documentary will conclude with his role in the formation of the ASS, views by his students, biographers, and recent ASA presidents. The documentary will be completed in time for ASA’s centenary in 2005.

Valentine M. Moghadam, Illinois State University, $7,000 for “Understanding Women’s Movements in the Middle East and North Africa: The Role of States, Identity and Global Linkages.” Funding is for a study of why women’s movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) emerged when they did, why they are less involved transnationally than women’s movements in “core” countries, and what explains the differences among them. The major project activities will include face-to-face interviews with women activists in MENA, collecting documentary data, and developing an inventory of movement achievements. The Moghadam will call on the sociological literature on social movements, globalization, and civil society to help theorize patterns and trends and to answer questions about the relation between women’s movements, economic integration in the world system, state interests, and the strength of civil society. A hoped for result of this study will be future work by a collaborative network of MENA scholars.