American Sociological Association

Section on Children and Youth

Section on Children and Youth Awards

Announcement— Section Awards for 2010

The deadline for our Distinguished Contribution Award is fast approaching (February 1). Please read the award description below, and if you can provide a nomination, I heartily encourage you to do so. Do bear in mind
that self-nominations are perfectly acceptable (don't be bashful!).  Also, the deadline for our section's Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award is also approaching (March 1). Again, please give this some thought, and consider submitting a nomination.

Distinguished Contribution Award

This year we will be awarding a Distinguished Contribution Award for Scholarship in the sociological study of children and youth. The award will be given for a book or paper published in 2007-2009. Please send nominations with a brief rationale (and, for books, include contact information at the publisher, if possible, in order to speed the process of requesting copies) to the Distinguished Contribution Award Committee Chair, Rachel Gordon at ragordon@uic.edu  NO LATER THAN February 1, 2010.

Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award

This award recognizes an outstanding paper authored by one or more graduate students. To qualify for this year author and any co-authors must have been students at the time the paper was written. Papers are eligible if they made a in 2008-2009, defined as one of  the following: either having been submitted for a class or seminar held in those years, or having been presented at a professional meeting in those years, or having been accepted for publication or published in those years. Students are welcome to submit their own papers. Please send paper submissions to the Award Committee Chair, Lingxin Hao at hao@jhu.edu NO LATER THAN March 1, 2010.



If you should have any questions concerning either of these awards, please do not hesitate to contact Rachel, Lingxin, or me about
them. Thanks, and I look forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta in August!

2009 Award Selection Results 

Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award 

Committee: Cindy Clark (Chair), Penn State University; Bill Corsaro, Indiana University; Katy Hadley, California State University—Sacramento; Jessica Kenty-Drane, Southern Connecticut University; Dan Cook, Rutgers University 

 

Description by Cindy Clark (Committee Chair): 

Winner: Kyle Longest 

All of these committee members took part in the review of submitted papers, which were rotated across the committee to ensure a thorough evaluation of each paper by scholars who did not have a teacher-student relationship with the author.  Committee members were professional and prompt in rating their assigned papers, and assessing the strengths and weakness of each paper.  The winner was chosen based on a consensus of committee members. 
 
The winner of our section Graduate Student Paper, Kyle Longest, is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His paper, titled "Popularity Lost:  Identity Status and its Consequences During the Transmission to Adulthood."  His paper asks the question whether high school popularity is destiny, with a lasting impact on adulthood.  Intriguingly, his answer might be thought of a tightly argued, scholarly version of the one-time film, Revenge of the Nerds, which garners popularity in high school may not bring long term social success after all. 

 

Early Career Award 

Committee: Rob Crosnoe (chair), University of Texas at Austin; Jessica Field, San Francisco State University; Holly Foster, Texas A&M University; Amanda Lewis, Emory University; Nancy Marshall, Wellesley College  

 

Description by Rob Crosnoe (Committee Chair):  

Winner

Lori Peek, an assistant professor of Sociology at Colorado State University who earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, is the 2009 winner of the Early Career Award from the ASA Section on Children and Youth.  Lori is a qualitative sociologist who studies child and adolescent development in the context of natural disasters, with a special focus on differences by race/ethnicity and gender.  She was nominated for this award by Alice Fothergill and Kai Erikson. Only four years into her professional career, Lori has already amassed many important accomplishments, publishing 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals (including top journals like Child Development) and another 12 chapters and encyclopedia entries.  What impressed the committee most, however, was not so much quantity of production but quality.  In particular, Lori is delving into important and timely issues that are woefully understudied.  How children and youth represent an incredibly vulnerable population in the wake of natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, the resilience they demonstrate in such disasters, and what the can contribute to recovery from such disasters are all valuable questions for sociologists to ask, but they are not asked enough.  Lori asks these questions, and then conducts hundreds of hours of interviews with and observations of children and youth coping with natural disasters and their families to provide meaningful answers.  These answers, in turn, provide insights into child development and the ecology of child development that generalize far beyond any the specific settings of natural disasters. 

For these reasons, Lori Peek exemplifies the spirit of this award.  She is forging her own career path and doing so with great success. 

 

Honorable Mention

Jeremy Staff, an assistant professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University who earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2004, was the runner-up for the Early Career Award from the ASA Section on Children and Youth.  In fact, the competition was so fierce and he came so close to winning that the committee decided to bestow, for the first time, an Honorable Mention to Jeremy, who was nominated for the award by Jeylan Mortimer. 

Jeremy is a life course sociologist who studies inequality and stratification among American youth, with a special interest in crime and delinquency.  He has been incredibly prolific, publishing 13 articles on the connections among adolescent behavior, school/work experiences, and peer dynamics in some of the top journals in sociology, including Social Forces, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Criminology.  He also has published 6 book chapters.  This work, organized by core sociological theories, applies cutting edge statistical techniques to a variety of data sources and seeks to inform policy.

Impressively, Jeremy is also amassing a solid track record of external funding for his work, including winning a K01 Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for a five-year project on adolescent work experiences and the transition to adulthood. 

Clearly, Jeremy is going places.

 

2008 Section Winners

Distinguished Contribution Award— Organization

Strategies for Children, a Boston organization.  http://www.strategiesforchildren.org/

Student Paper Award
Hilary Levey (Princeton). "Which One Is Yours?: Children and Ethnography."

 

 

2007 Section Winners

Distinguished Publication Award
Laurie Schaffner, University of Illinois-Chicago.     Girls in Trouble with the Law

 

Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award

Karl Bryant, UCSD.  "Making Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood:  Historical Lessons for Contemporary Debates"

Christopher Wildeman, Princeton. "Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage”

 

2006 Section Winners

Distinguished Contribution Award—Early Career

Amanda E. Lewis, University of Illinois-Chicago

 

Student Paper Award
Natasha K. Warikoo, University of London. "Youth Culture and Peer Status among Children of Immigrants in London and New York: Assessing the Cultural Explanation for Downward Assimilation"