- Deborah Carr Appointed Editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior
- Abrutyn and Ghaziani Appointed Editors of Contexts
- Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Immigration and Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles
Deborah Carr Appointed Editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior
The news that Deborah Carr was to be appointed the new editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (JHSB) came in the same email as the request to write this introduction. The “breaking news” that the American Sociological Association’s flagship journal in health was to be in the hands of my friend and former colleague was wonderful. The invitation to write a profile to introduce her was an honor. An “introduction,” however, should be unnecessary for anyone who has been conducting and publishing sociological research on health, aging and the life course, families, death and dying, and bereavement. It would be hard to write a paper in any of these broad areas without citing Carr’s wide-ranging research, and it would be hard to submit a paper on these topics to a journal for which she has not been a member of the editorial board or the editor-in-chief. Her influence on the field has already been one of raising intellectual and methodological standards, and it will continue to be so as she moves into her new role as JHSB editor beginning January 1, 2023.
A Scholar of Many Talents
I knew Carr first as a friend of colleagues at annual conferences; then as a colleague of my own at Rutgers University where we collaborated on research; then as a member of her editorial board during her tenure as editor (for five years!) of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (JGSS); in leadership roles at both ASA and the Gerontological Society of America; and recently as an associate editor of the ninth edition of the Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (Elsevier 2021). So, I have known Carr through the “micro” day-to-day experience with someone whose office is next door, and also as a “macro” influential decision-maker in a bewildering array of national professional and research organizations.
Carr is someone who makes things happen. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of 11 books with leading sociologists. Her CV shows nine pages of refereed journal articles, many of them with students and former students. She has had leadership roles in a dozen externally funded grants, several with multiple waves of funding and multiple leads at multiple universities. It is no wonder that people want to collaborate with her, because it is a guarantee that the project will succeed and the quality will be of the highest caliber.
While her work ethic is irreproachable, that should not overshadow the ingenious, creative researcher she is, one with a deep appreciation for the multiple methods sociologists use to understand patterns at the population level, and at the level of the individual. Carr’s training in the unusual pairing of demographic and social psychological research gives her an appreciation of what can be discovered with these complementary approaches. Her topics of research are of the greatest personal and also public interest. They exemplify C. Wright Mills’s linkage of personal troubles and public issues: the embedding of the life course in history and social conditions; the policies and social determinants that have a bearing on decisions made about end-of-life care; the “epidemic” of overweight and the personal self-image of body stigma; the life-changing condition of widowhood and social relationships in late adulthood. All of these topics engage profound human experiences that are situated in social structure. Because she has a vision of where the research is going, she has a nose for what is new and important across a truly wide range of areas and methodologies.
A Mentor and Student Advocate
Carr is also a superb mentor with an extensive record of publishing with her students. I have met a number of her student coauthors at meetings; I have seen her critique and encourage them at presentations, and I know that she has successfully mentored many to considerable professional success as independent researchers.
More relevant to the JHSB editor role, Carr has been a real advocate of graduate and professional students as co-peer-reviewers for articles. The system of peer review rests on the ability, time, and resources of a journal to get reviews, and as every academic editor knows, it is extremely difficult to get reviewers to accept reviews. The only way to solve this problem is to make sure that graduate students understand the fragility of the peer review system and commit to performing regular peer reviews as a professional service, in recompense for the privilege of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. This message is best delivered by the practice of letting students in on the process. While Carr was editor of JGSS, the journal regularly encouraged reviewers to collaborate on their review with a student. Its website asks if a student collaborated on the review and, if so, to include the student’s email, which is used to thank them for their work. This is an extremely important kind of institutional mentoring that the entire field needs.
Deborah Carr will make a great editor of JHSB. Her early professional career was in editing in New York; she knows how to handle manuscripts. Her understanding and promotion of a wide variety of areas of research in health will bring the best papers to JHSB, and her editorial judgment will bring the best of those to press.
By Ellen Idler, Emory University
Abrutyn and Ghaziani Appointed Editors of Contexts
It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Seth Abrutyn and Amin Ghaziani as the new editors of Contexts, which brings the best sociological research to the general public and scholars outside the discipline who may not be familiar with our internal scholarly jargon. As our friends in science studies would say, Contexts is a site of translation. Moreover, Contexts is not only designed to convey the substance and content of the best sociological work to these extra-disciplinary publics; even more centrally, the journal’s primary purpose is to communicate those famed implications—usually populating the back end of published journal articles or the last chapters of books—that sociological research has for practice, policy, and everyday life more generally. As it says on its website, Contexts is the public face of sociology.
Now, we all have read our Erving Goffman (and thrown dinner parties at home), so we instinctively understand that you don’t want to entrust being the public face of anything, let alone our entire discipline, to just anyone. Well, we can rest assured; very few scholars are more apt and ready for this august responsibility than Abrutyn and Ghaziani. Moreover, their scholarly trajectories in the discipline have already been characterized by doing and doing well a lot of this crucial translational work, both concerning their own research and that of others. Both are gifted sociological thinkers, methodologists, and researchers who are always mindful of outlining and linking sociological work to sociological practice. And both have produced work with broad and deep real-world impact, including urban policy, social movements, health, and suicide.
Seth Abrutyn
Associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, Abrutyn is one of the discipline’s most prolific, gifted, and imaginative theorists. He has written on a bewildering variety of topics cutting across the usual thematic, conceptual, and disciplinary divisions within and outside sociology: from the micro to the macro, from the historical to the structural, from the institutional to the interactional. This Renaissance person’s penchant reflects his training as a general theorist by his teacher, Jonathan Turner, at the University of Riverside, where he earned his PhD in 2009. Abrutyn has a long string of publications in the discipline’s top journals, a book based on his dissertation (Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology), and three high-impact edited volumes on classical and contemporary sociological theory. Abrutyn does not just theorize—although he does that as well as anyone—but applies theory to a range of substantive issues and problems from institutional entrepreneurship, collective action, and, most notably, the interactional and socioemotional roots of mental health and suicide—work that has had a substantial impact on the ground.
Amin Ghaziani
Ghaziani is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia. In an inordinately short amount of time—earning his PhD from Northwestern University in 2006—Ghaziani has become a leading scholar across a mind-bending number of subfields (both intra- and interdisciplinary), including cultural sociology, social movement studies, sexuality studies, queer theory, urban studies, and sociological methodology. Ghaziani’s work is characterized by conceptual and methodological innovation (usually in the same publication), with a penchant to challenge and transcend the common wisdom of settled literatures and established approaches wherever he trains his sharp sociological eye. Along the way, he has authored or coauthored five books (including the multiple award-winning Dividends of Dissent and There Goes the Gayborhood?) while publishing scores of articles in our discipline’s top journals. A committed public intellectual, Ghaziani is also a virtual fixture in popular media, providing his unique perspective on the (once again, insanely extensive) range of subject matter on which he is considered one of North America’s top experts. His work on urban sexualities and culture has, unsurprisingly, had a tremendous impact, not only in academia (in the form of awards and citations) but also on the general public and policy stakeholders.
I think you will agree that Contexts, and with it the public face of sociology, could not be in better hands.
By Omar Lizardo, University of California-Los Angeles
Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Immigration and Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles
By Walter Nicholls, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California-Irvine and Jody Agius Vallejo, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California
Los Angeles is a vibrant multiracial city resplendent with possibility—a place where American dreams are made, and a place where they also wither in the perpetual sunshine. Under the shadow of the famed Hollywood sign, social problems in Los Angeles are palpable, including high levels of racial residential segregation, perpetual racialized police violence, a highly stratified education system, racial health disparities, an affordable housing crisis, gentrification and displacement, environmental degradation, a water crisis, and increasing numbers of unhoused people and families. The city’s contradictory trends in prosperity and poverty have occurred against a backdrop of significant racial/ethnic change. Los Angeles is a top immigrant destination and has served as a home base for nativists on the one hand and as a springboard for progressive activism for immigrant rights on the other.
Los Angeles has always been a primary immigrant destination. Ethnic enclaves and ethnoburbs dot LA’s urban sprawl, demonstrating the diversity in origins of Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and North African, and Black immigrants in the region. Nearly half of all immigrant arrivals to the U.S. settled in California in the two decades following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In 1960, just under 10 percent of Angelenos were immigrants and that number doubled by 1980 (National Equity Atlas 2022). Today, 35 percent of Angelenos are immigrants. Nearly one-in-five Angelenos are undocumented or live with an undocumented family member (Equity Research Institute and California Community Foundation 2021). The immigrant community in Los Angeles is long-settled—more than 81 percent of immigrant Angelenos have resided in the country for a decade or longer, as have more than 70 percent of undocumented Angelenos. In a county of more than 10 million people, almost three-quarters of Angelenos identify as people of color (California Immigrant Data Portal 2022). Immigration is central to the multiracial social fabric of LA and its growth as a global city. Dramatic demographic change in the state and the region—combined with nativism, socioeconomic inequalities, and the fight for equity—has spurred community organizing and social movements that have shaped local and national politics for decades, making it a hub for immigrant rights activism.
New Organizations Emerge
In the 1980s, civil wars in Central America contributed to a massive influx of refugees and immigrants (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001; Nicholls 2019). The newcomers and their Los Angeles-based allies created a range of new organizations, most of which were clustered one mile west of downtown. These organizations provided essential services (e.g., legal, health, literacy, English as a Second Language) and protested the U.S. government’s interventionist policies in Central America (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). Additionally, some organizations participated in campaigns to change federal immigration policies in response to the fact that most Central Americans were being denied asylum status (Menjívar 2006). This resulted in several important victories during the mid-1990s, including the American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh case, Temporary Protected Status, and the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act.
Many organizations turned their efforts to organizing immigrant workers (Milkman et al. 2010; Gnes 2016). During the 1990s, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) began to organize immigrant workers—predominantly domestic workers and day laborers—who had long-been neglected by labor unions (Patler 2010). At the same time, the Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA) used the tools of “popular education” to organize day laborers and create new “worker centers.” In 1992, two South Korean-born activists created the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA), which was renamed the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in 2005 (Kwon 2010). The organization had strong ties to the labor and prodemocracy movement of 1980s South Korea and to the progressive wing of the U.S. labor union movement. Like CHIRLA and IDEPSCA, KIWA organized immigrant workers in a sector long-neglected by Los Angeles unions: restaurants.
In 1997, two activists who had participated in KIWA’s Summer Activist Training created the Pilipino Workers Center (PWC). For a brief period, KIWA served as PWC’s fiscal sponsor and CHIRLA contributed to paying initial staff costs. PWC’s organizing activities largely focused on low-wage Filipino immigrant workers in the domestic and home care sectors (Ghandnoosh 2010). These and other organizations had similar ideologies, developed a common organizing model, and forged strong collaborative ties with one another. These attributes enhanced their collective mobilization capacities. Observers called this the “Los Angeles organizing model” (Milkman et al. 2010).
Adjusting the Organizing Model
From 1996 onward, changes in the national political context precipitated adjustments to the organizing model. Federal anti-immigrant policies presented immigrant communities with significant threats, while the Bush and Obama administrations also expressed an opportunity for legislation that would provide legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants (Nicholls 2019). Los Angeles-based organizations responded differently to this context. In 2005, CHIRLA was the most prominent immigrant rights organization in the city. At that time, it prioritized legislative advocacy and electoral mobilization over organizing immigrant workers (Patler 2010). Organizations like IDEPSCA, KIWA, and PWC continued to organize immigrant workers and advocate for supportive municipal-level policies. Lastly, day laborer organizers from CHIRLA left the organization and created the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). Their aim was to organize workers across the country and fight municipal- and state-level anti-immigration policies (Dziembowska 2010). By the end of the decade, the field had lost some of its cohesion as individual organizations moved in different directions.
During the 2010s, the field spawned innovative organizations and policies. Various organizations (e.g., CHIRLA, UCLA Labor Center, and NDLON) provided support for undocumented immigrant youth activists who came to be known as the Dreamers (Nicholls 2013). In 2013, Los Angeles-based youth went on to play a leading role in the fight for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In response to ramped up deportations during the Obama and Trump administrations, Los Angeles organizations advocated for state- and municipal-level sanctuary policies. These policies limited cooperation of local police with federal immigration authorities. In California, these campaigns resulted in the passage of the California Trust Act (2013), the Transparent Review of Unjust Transfers and Holds (Truth) Act (2017), and the CA Values Act (2018). The amalgamation of state-level laws focusing on immigrant inclusion make California the country’s most protective state of its undocumented immigrant residents.
Los Angeles demonstrates that for immigrant workers, the American dream is achieved through collective political action. Immigrant workers struggled to obtain a livable wage and mounted a series of campaigns to protect California residents from revanchist federal immigration policies. These policies benefited undocumented immigrant workers, but they also helped create a more just and humane city and state.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
