We are pleased to introduce you to the distinguished winners of ASA’s 2023 awards. The winners will be honored in a ceremony during the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Each of the pieces below was submitted by the relevant award selection committee, and we thank the committees for their good work.
Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award
David L. Brunsma, Virginia Tech, and David G. Embrick, University of Connecticut
On behalf of the American Sociological Association (ASA), it is my honor to present the 2023 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award to David L. Brunsma of Virginia Tech and David G. Embrick of the University of Connecticut. In their capacities as scholars, editors, and mentors, Brunsma and Embrick have made irreplaceable contributions to the studies of race and racism, not only through their own collaborative and individual works, but even more significantly through everything that they have done to promote the scholarship and insights of other race scholars. Indeed, in addition to their impressive record of groundbreaking books and articles that have deepened our understandings and discourses around social justice, racism, and human rights, Brunsma and Embrick have dedicated their careers to ensuring that countless other researchers will have the opportunities and outlets to make their own contributions.
In 2013, Brunsma and Embrick founded Sociology of Race & Ethnicity (SRE) as the official journal of the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, establishing it as ASA’s flagship journal for the publication of studies of race and racism. After the journal’s founding, Brunsma and Embrick went on to serve as co-editors of SRE for nine years, overseeing the publication of over 270 academic articles and leading the journal to become a go-to source for innovative anti-racist scholarship. It is hard to overstate how significant and impactful SRE has been in not only showcasing important work on race and racism, but in creating a space for scholars of color to share their contributions, influence the discipline, and develop their own research trajectories. In short, Brunsma and Embrick have built a venue in which sociologists of color who are often kept out of academic journals can make the scholarly impacts that are necessary for earning tenure and establishing one’s academic career. To cite one of their nominators, “from the beginning [Brunsma and Embrick] sought to demystify the publishing process, center critical and non-mainstream approaches, and pro-actively reached out to young scholars.”
In addition to their tireless work establishing and managing Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Brunsma and Embrick have made even more publishing opportunities possible through their Sociology of Race & Ethnicity book series with the University of Georgia Press. Much like their accomplishments with the SRE journal, Brunsma and Embricks’s book series provides another important opportunity to highlight important research with “theoretical perspectives (and methods and methodologies) that have been historically marginalized but that are intellectually engaged, rigorous, and critical.” Established in 2018, this book series released its first three titles in 2022 with five more scheduled for 2023, with more than half of these texts authored by women of color.
Finally, Brunsma and Embrick have also made their tremendous impact felt through their constant mentoring efforts with junior faculty of color and hundreds of students over their careers. For example, while serving as co-editors of SRE, Brunsma and Embrick toured over 40 university campuses to offer workshops on the publishing process, providing vital insights for young scholars into how they can strategize and approach the various stages of pitching, submitting, and revising their written work. As any established academic can verify, this familiarity with the process is a huge advantage for knowing where to submit manuscripts and how to respond to reviewers in ways that can facilitate the acceptance and ultimate publication of one’s research. Making this information available to scholars of color who are less likely to otherwise have access to this privileged knowledge has been nothing short of transformative for many individual sociologists, and for the study of race and racism as a whole.
Dissertation Award
Laura Garbes, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, for “Racialized Airwaves: Tracing the sonic color line in the American public radio industry,” completed at Brown University.
Laura Garbes is the co-recipient of the 2023 ASA Dissertation Award for “Racialized Airwaves: Tracing the sonic color line in the American public radio industry.” The dissertation focuses on National Public Radio (NPR) and investigates the tension between the intention of reaching diverse audiences and the reality that NPR centers a white majority in its content, audience, and leadership. The methods include both organizational and archival data from across five decades of NPR’s existence, as well as 82 interviews with NPR employees, almost entirely non-white, to center the voices of people of color against the backdrop of a white-dominant space.
A key element of Garbes’s work is the discussion of the sonic color line as a social force that creates the racial divide in public radio, drawing from the development of the sonic color line concept in the work of Jennifer Lynn Stoever, a professor of English who studies the role of sound in demarking racial difference and creating racial inequalities within multiple artistic media. Garbes extends this work to the study of public radio. As she explains:
“Rather than empirically indexing a set of linguistic practices as ‘public radio voice,’ I examine how the concept of ‘public radio voice’ disciplines nonwhite speakers based on the ‘appropriateness’ of their speech. I ask: how did the very ways of speaking associated in mainstream discourse with public radio become a proxy for intelligence and respectability in the ears of its core listenership? How do people of color within the industry both navigate and disrupt such racialized expectations?
These empirical questions have broader political implications. Who gets heard in the public sphere, and why? In both the metaphorical and literal sense of ‘hearing,’ how does one’s voice get deemed authoritative or trustworthy in dominant discourse? How are voices in the public sphere subjected to racialized, classed, and gendered expectations? What is the role of institutions in either amplifying or silencing voices in the linguistic marketplace? And how do racialized subjects in media and the cultural industries navigate these constraints?”
In answering this final question, about how racialized subjects navigate the public radio industry, particularly at NPR, Garbes examines the ways that employees of color use their influence to create increasing space for non-white voices in the content of the stories they produce, while also seeking to protect their participants of color from the racism of the institutional space. She shows that the racialized nature of the space is typically very visible to the employees of color while often remaining invisible to the white employees. The work that employees of color do to change the content of what is ultimately aired is unrecognized and requires additional unpaid time.
The dissertation closes with discussions of the implications for both public radio specifically and white racialized organizations more generally. There are lessons for us as scholars in that. Academia generally and sociology specifically are white racialized institutions. Among the various forms of work we do, speaking is central—from teaching classes to presenting at conferences and finally to giving interviews on the radio, on podcasts, and on television. We also participate in the sonic color line. When we receive calls from journalists looking for sources, we should ask them why they chose us and who else they are speaking to.
Garbes holds a PhD and MA from Brown University, both in Sociology, and a BA from Tufts University where she double majored in Psychology and Spanish Literature. She has now completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she is an Assistant Professor of Sociology.
Dissertation Award
David Burkhart Showalter, Harvard University, for “Going Nowhere: The Social Life of Opioids in Backcountry California,” completed at the University of California, Berkeley.
David B. Showalter is the co-recipient of the 2023 ASA Dissertation Award for “Going Nowhere: The Social Life of Opioids in Backcountry California.” The dissertation investigates the opioid crisis in California’s mountainous backcountry in order to understand the spread of opioids to a region which lacks an organized drug market, and where opioid users tend to live alongside the authorities that police them. Showalter’s dissertation uncovers the social life of opioids, both in terms of how isolation and scarcity affect the health consequences of opioid use in remote parts of the United States, and also how the intimate and dense relations between users and law enforcement officers in these small towns affects how drugs are policed.
Through in-depth interviews with 69 drug users, as well as interviews with 176 local officials and service providers, and two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a dozen rural and remote counties, Showalter opens up the world of small-town opioid use to the reader in vivid detail. The opioid or overdose crisis is one of the most challenging public health crises facing the United States today. However, even as this crisis has severely affected non-urban areas, most of the research on this issue focuses on urban parts of the country. Showalter’s dissertation is a welcome contribution to this public health issue because of how it sheds light on the unique ways in which rurality exacerbates the opioid crisis at both individual and community levels.
Empirically, Showalter is able to do this through their ethnographically rich portrayals of opioid users in small towns. Dismantling the simplistic stereotype of drug users as lazy and irresponsible, Showalter reveals how gaining access to drugs requires diligence, self-control and planning. Users also have to pay much higher prices because of the smallness of the rural drug market. In addition, the lack of anonymity that comes from living in a small town with high social embeddedness creates challenges when trying to access harm-reduction services.
Theoretically, Showalter offers multiple contributions to the literature. The committee saw their work on rural place effects as an important extension of sociology’s long tradition of studying urban neighborhood effects. Their novel concept of “acquainted marginality” reveals how the combination of geographic isolation and dense social ties can also create marginalization through the spoiling of opioid users’ reputation via neighbors’ gossip and the constant formal and informal surveillance users have to endure.
Finally, at a very practical level, Showalter offers evidence-based suggestions for reducing the high drug-related death rate in the United States. The dissertation ends with concrete, tailored suggestions for policy reform. These suggestions come from Showalter’s years of active involvement in harm reduction services in both urban and non-urban locations, and their firsthand witnessing of how programs that might have worked in urban settings are undermined in remote, small-town settings. This allows them to provide policy recommendations for all aspects of the rural opioid crisis, including healthcare, harm reduction, substance use treatment, and law enforcement. In this regard, committee members saw Showalter’s dissertation as an example of public, problem-solving sociology at its best.
Showalter’s dissertation research was supported, in part, by National Science Foundation, Center for Engaged Scholarship, and Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy grants. They received their PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022, and then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department at Harvard University. They started a new position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard in July 2023.
Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology
Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University
Zelizer is an outstanding ambassador for sociology, globally and outside our discipline. She has advanced sociology by fundamentally reorienting multiple subfields within the discipline and claimed novel space for sociological inquiry into economic processes. Zelizer asserts that her agenda is “to dispute simplistic causal assumptions.” She challenges us to understand when “markets and money [are] destructive but when do they enhance welfare and solidarity.”
Zelizer helped to establish the subfield of economic sociology, and the Economic Sociology Section honored her foundational contributions by naming their best book award the “Zelizer Prize.” Her scholarship has also powerfully influenced researchers outside of sociology, including legal scholars, anthropologists, historians, behavioral economists, feminist economists, political scientists, and business scholars, among others.
Zelizer’s insights have changed how we think about household financial decision-making. It is nearly impossible to encounter a debate about the recent Child Tax Credits that cut childhood poverty almost in half or to assess how people will use universal basic income or their retirement savings without some reference to Zelizer’s insights into why and how people make decisions about how to use their money. In her work, she demonstrated that one dollar is not like just any other. Money from a welfare check versus money from a child ’s earnings will be used toward different types of purchases and may even be labeled as different kinds of money. In the words of Horacio Ortiz (East China Normal University), Zelizer “undoubtedly stands out as the most influential sociologist of money worldwide in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.”
Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Zelizer emigrated to the United States in the 1970s. She received her BA degree at Rutgers and her MA and PhD degrees at Columbia University. She taught at Rutgers, Columbia, and Barnard before moving to Princeton, her academic home since 1988, and where she is now the Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology.
Zelizer was honored with the Distinguished Career Award from the ASA Section on Children and Youth and the ASA Historical and Comparative Sociology Section. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Russell Sage Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mellow Foundation. Zelizer is an elected member of the PEN American Center, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Zelizer’s influence has also spread through her mentorship of accomplished scholars. The network of scholars testifying to the significance of Zelizer’s research for their scholarship extends to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Eastern Europe, France, Hong Kong, Israel, Latin America, and the Netherlands. Princeton University recognized her outstanding contribution by awarding her the 2013 Graduate School’s Mentoring Prize in the Social Sciences. Zelizer is a brilliant role model whose broad impact highlights the importance of sociology outside of our academic discipline.
The charge of the Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology is to select an honoree whose work has served as a model for others, has elevated the professional status or public image of the field outside of sociology, and has been widely recognized for its significant impacts. Zelizer is most deserving of this award because she has done all the above. She exemplifies how a distinguished career in the practice of sociology can make measurable impacts on public discussions and policy.
Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award
Jeffrey Chin, Le Moyne College
Jeffrey Chin is Professor of Sociology and Carnegie National Scholar at Le Moyne College. Although this award is not given solely to those who have made contributions to the teaching of sociology over the course of an entire career, Chin’s letters of recommendation and curriculum vitae show what can be accomplished when doing so.
At Le Moyne, Chin has received the Beatrice Robinson Advisor of the Year award, which surely reflects his foundation in the development and implementation of effective and innovative teaching techniques, especially those focused on enhancing sociology curricula and student outcomes. The reach of these techniques has expanded beyond his own campus through numerous teaching-related books, edited volumes, journal articles, and presentations. His publications in the scholarship of teaching and learning span nearly four decades and he has also been instrumental in the publication of other’s work in this area as an editor and editorial board member of Teaching Sociology. Chin has also served on the Council and as chair of the ASA’s Section on Teaching and Learning and received that Section’s Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology.
Perhaps Chin’s most important service in support of individual sociology teachers has been through his numerous leadership roles in the organization of teaching-related workshops and symposia to help share his own work and that of others, including at ASA Annual Meetings. Chin has also served as Secretary-Treasurer of Alpha Kappa Delta, the international sociology honor society, since 2008, using this position to help develop pre-conference teaching workshops with various regional sociological associations and the Association of Black Sociologists. When in-person workshops were not possible due to the COVID 19 pandemic, Chin created a series of sociology pedagogy webinars and is currently under contract for a volume entitled Emerging Stronger: Pedagogical Lessons from the Pandemic.
Through his publications, presentations, and workshops, Chin has influenced the teaching of countless individual sociologists, but he has also had a profound impact on U.S. sociology departments. Since 1997, he has served as a member of the ASA’s Program Reviewers and Consultants, conducting over 50 site visits to assist departments in the assessment of their curricula and teaching. His impact at sociology departments across the country is further reflected in his co-authorship of the ASA’s 2017 publication, The Sociology Major in the Changing Landscape of Higher Education.
This brief summary cannot adequately capture the scope of Jeffrey Chin’s influence on the teaching of sociology and on sociology curricula across the country. The award committee is honored to present him the award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Sociology in recognition of his career-long dedication to these goals.
Distinguished Scholarly Book Award
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, University of Southern California, Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States (Stanford 2022).
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the Florence Everline Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her study of migrant domestic work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Unfree examines the employment sponsorship system for migrant workers known as the kafala, which offers work for Filipina migrant domestics, but obligates them to work solely for their sponsoring local Emirati and to seek their sponsor’s permission to change jobs or leave the country. Human rights advocates have been intensely critical of this arrangement, but Parreñas, leveraging sweeping ethnographic data from employers and workers, in the UAE and in the Philippines, illustrates tremendous variation in migrant worker experiences.
Drawing on interviews with 85 Filipina domestic workers, 35 employers, as well as ethnographic observation of pre-departure training in the Philippines, she finds that some workers are dehumanized, some infantilized, while others are recognized as autonomous women and rights bearing workers. She asks: Can these migrant women all be described as uniformly unfree? As a corrective to overdetermined theories of structural violence and romanticized portrayals of migrant agency, she offers a theory of arbitrary domination: not abuse itself, but it’s possibility. Her concept of unfreedom is relational, rather than structural. Migrant domestics are in asymmetric relation of interdependence with their employers, which creates the analytical leverage to understand when and why some employers dehumanize, infantilize, or recognize their domestic employees.
Extending a republican theory of freedom, she illuminates a social process of moral mediation that informally constrains the arbitrary domination of Filipina domestics, even while formal regulation is minimal and rarely enforced. Drawing on economic sociology to inform labor scholarship, moral mediation refers to the way markets are guided not only by rationalism, the impulse to maximize labor efficiency, but also by justice, a desire to treat workers decently and avoid the public shame of abusive maltreatment. Migrant domestics, encouraged by the Philippines migration authorities, exercise “antipower” by negotiating directly with their employers: for better pay, time off, and permission to socialize and date. While moral mediation constrains the worst excesses of the kafala, it does not alter the fundamentally unequal relations of power in which migrant domestics find themselves. Ultimately, the book is a tale of constrained agency within a system of unfreedom that variously doles out opportunity and abuse, depending on how an employer exercises their power over migrant workers and how they respond to their demands for improved treatment.
The book is a crowning achievement in a startlingly productive career. Parreñas’s scholarship is a staple in sociology courses around the country and the world, just as Parreñas herself is a pathbreaking and seminal scholar across the discipline. The book reflects Parreñas’s strengths as ethnographer of gender, labor, and global migration, who makes an understudied case of South-to-South migration speak to the big questions of our time about the nature of freedom, the reality of exploitation, and the possibilities for agency. Her ability to effortlessly tack back and forth from case to theory, employer to worker, the Philippines to the UAE, illustrates that in the hands of a master ethnographer and social theorist, Parreñas, once again, pushes the field into new methodological, theoretical, and analytical territory. The study will be mandatory reading in the fields of labor, migration, gender, economic sociology, and beyond. Unfree breathes new life into old debates on the nature of freedom and offers a clear-eyed portrayal of the realities of subordinated labor around the globe and the resilience of migrant women seeking dignity and self-determination.
The committee also offers the designation of Honorable Mention to:
Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families–and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books 2022).
The award committee offers this recognition in light of the moral urgency and agenda setting impact of this exceptional book.
Jessie Bernard Award
Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley
Raka Ray is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Ray is the recipient of this year’s Jessie Bernard Award, which recognizes a scholar who has dedicated their career to enlarging “the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.” Ray’s work beautifully embodies the spirit of this award, modeling a feminist approach to service, mentoring, and teaching, in addition to a record of impactful gender research. Letter writer Amita Baviskar notes, “it is not only what she has done but how she has done it that deserves to be recognized and celebrated.” The award committee enthusiastically concurs.
Ray is an accomplished sociologist with interests in gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, and the emerging middle class in India. About her research agenda, she states, “My interest in gender is fundamental to my work as a scholar, even as how I study gender has continually evolved.” She is the co-author of Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India, which Joya Misra describes as “a masterpiece of gender scholarship,” and the author of Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India, as well as author, co-author, or editor of numerous other books and articles. Letter writer Joya Misra writes, “it is hard to imagine a scholar who better fits the [Jessie Bernard] award.”
Each letter writer eloquently describes Ray’s contributions to diversifying and expanding the sociological lens both outside the US, and specifically to the Global South, but also theoretically. As Michael Buroway notes, “launching her feminism from India, but having been a student in the US, she could appreciate just how US feminism (and sociology more broadly) reflected the particularities of the US. Thus, Dr. Ray became a pioneer of a postcolonial feminism before it had a name, before it was recognized as such within sociology.” And Baviskar writes, “Raka Ray’s scholarship has influenced and inspired not only sociologists of gender in India but also those working on social movements, labour relations, economic liberalization, and postcolonial forms of power.”
The award committee was especially impressed with Ray’s extensive record of service and mentorship. She has served on numerous committees both at UC Berkeley and for ASA; her vitae depicts the career of a deeply engaged scholar-teacher-citizen. Buroway remarks that “no sooner was she installed [as Dean] than she set about making social justice the guiding research program of her reign, but also introducing scholarships for marginalized undergraduates.” A generous mentor, Ray has worked with numerous students who have gone on to their own esteemed careers. Misra suggests that Ray “has cracked the nut of how to provide mentoring that both allows her students to gain from thoughtful and serious intellectual feedback, and to feel self-efficacy, confident enough to complete and publish their works.”
A hallmark of Ray’s contributions is that she is exceptionally accomplished across all the areas of a scholar’s career, including teaching, research, service, and mentorship. Her imprint can be seen in so many ways, for example in the flourishing careers of her students, in her own classroom, and in her dedicated and ethical institutional leadership. More, she has sustained this multifaceted and brilliant career for decades. As Misra notes, “what is perhaps most interesting, thinking through Professor Ray’s works, is how her theorizations have changed over time. She is not a scholar whose work ossified.” Much the same can be said about her teaching, service, and mentorship, too.
For these reasons and many more, please join me in celebrating Raka Ray, this year’s recipient of the Jessie Bernard Award.
Public Understanding of Sociology Award
Douglas Hartmann and Christopher Uggen, University of Minnesota
Both Douglas Hartmann and Christopher Uggen are renowned scholars at the University of Minnesota; Hartmann is a Professor of Sociology and previous Chair of the University’s Sociology Department and Uggen is their Regents Professor and Martindale Chair in Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs.
Hartmann, who received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego, has a broad area of expertise and covers the cultural sociology of race and sport, ethnic boundary-making, colorblindness, diversity, and religious belief. He has authored various books and articles, which include Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press 2016) and Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World, which was co-authored with Syed Ali (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group 2015), and his work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and Social Problems. He is also a highly sought-after media commentator who has regularly appeared in a broad array of outlets, including HBO, CBS This Morning, BBC Radio 4, and USA Today.
Uggen, who received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin, specializes in the study of crime, law, and inequality from a life course perspective. He has written several works, including Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which was co-authored by Michael Massoglia and Jason Schnittker (Oxford 2022), and Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, which was co-authored by Jeff Manza (Oxford 2006). His writing is frequently cited in the media and includes various outlets like The New York Times, CNN, Vox, NBC, and The Atlantic. He also served as the Vice President of our Association from 2017-2018.
Described by their nominators as, “stalwart champions of sociology and its potential to inform and engage publics of all kinds,” Hartmann and Uggen first worked together as co-editors of ASA’s Contexts, a magazine that hails as the “public face of sociology.” In their “from the editors” note in Fall 2009, both Hartmann and Uggen said that they would not consider their tenure at Contexts to be “a success unless – or until – we get our material into the hands and heads of significantly more members of the public – regular folks as well as opinion leaders and policy-makers.” In the spirit of further pursuing this endeavor, Hartmann and Uggen would continue their partnership beyond just Contexts and launch The Society Pages (TSP) in 2011.
Deemed as the sine qua non, or a thing that is absolutely necessary, in one of their nomination letters, TSP is revered as a platform that helps take “research and analytical skills beyond the confines of the gated community of sociologists.” Both Hartmann and Uggen have received no personal compensation for this open-access project, but they have dedicated countless hours to maintain this free repository of sociological knowledge that highlights the work of sociologists and policy experts and serves as an invaluable pedagogical tool.
Annually, this award honors members who have made “exemplary contributions to advance the public understanding of sociology, sociological research, and scholarship among the general public.” This year, it was evident to the Committee that Hartmann and Uggen are deserving of recognition for their tireless efforts towards making sociology accessible to all. As one of their nominator’s states, both Hartmann and Uggen, “embody the spirit of this award because they have truly built networks – institutional, technical, and personal – devoted to the cultivation of public sociology.” As leaders in information equity, Douglas Hartmann and Christopher Uggen are public sociologists of the highest order and the most fitting winners of the ASA 2023 Public Understanding of Sociology Award.
W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award
Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University
Transformative. Pioneering. Iconoclastic. Those were the words the selection committee kept returning to when considering the work of Viviana Zelizer for the W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award. These are apt terms, as they are equally descriptive of Du Bois’s career in and out of sociology, underscoring how deserving Zelizer is of this award. Considered by many one of the greatest and internationally impactful living sociologists, Prof. Zelizer has, over a career spanning more than four decades, made field-defining and generative contributions to various areas, including Economic Sociology, the Sociology of Childhood, the Sociology of Intimacy, and perhaps most fundamentally, the Sociology of Money. More precisely, Zelizer’s scholarship has not simply added to existing lines of inquiry in these fields; in all cases, Zelizer’s work constituted veritable intellectual revolutions, generating whole lines of scholarship where there were virtually none.
As a result, contemporary economic sociology has taken a decided “Zelizerian” turn, with core concepts and methodological and analytic approaches in the field either traceable directly to Zelizer’s work or the scores of students and acolytes whose work she has influenced and profoundly shaped. In this respect, Zelizer’s tremendous impact has been realized as much by her tireless mentorship of numerous women and scholars of color, leading to the wholesale transformation of both the face and the thematic orientations of various fields central to contemporary sociology. Zelizer’s nominators were unanimous in noting that no other scholar has done more to shape the foundations of the sociological study of economic life in contemporary sociology, with her work serving as the cornerstone of multiple thriving and expanding paradigms in the field, including the “morals and markets” and “relational work” approaches. Nevertheless, Zelizer’s multifarious contributions do not stop there. Her work has profoundly influenced fields such as the sociology of morality, the study of markets and evaluation, consumers and consumption, gender and sexuality, the sociology of law and the family, and many more.
Based on the dissertation work, her first book, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States is widely considered a classic of twentieth-century American sociology. The book demonstrates the deep cultural, moral, and institutional work required for new markets, pioneering a deeply sociological and historically grounded approach to market emergence. Her second book, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children continued in the same vein, tracing changing cultural understandings of the “value” of children, from “profane” contributors to family subsistence, to “sacred” and “priceless” individuals who needed to be protected from the strictures of the market, novel understandings that produced new tensions when markets for children’s life insurance attempted to get off the ground. The book is considered a pioneering contribution to the sociology of childhood— a field it helped create—and the sociology of valuation and evaluation. Her third book, The Social Meaning of Money, is a modern sociological classic and an international blockbuster translated into multiple languages. Once again, the book singlehandedly defined the contours of a new field, the Sociology of Money, showing how money in particular and monetary exchange more generally, rather than being an asocial mechanism for market transactions, is fundamental in the definition and constitution of diverse types of social relations. The book cemented the thriving “relational work” paradigm, which was continued in her fourth book, The Purchase of Intimacy, another landmark contribution that expanded the empirical and theoretical scope of economic sociology to examine the economic aspects of intimate social relationships, moving beyond the idea of a fundamental antithesis between market transactions and emotionally significant ties.
Multiple ASA Sections and several institutions worldwide have recognized Zelizer’s undeniably significant and transformative lifetime accomplishments. She now receives the highest ASA honor for a distinguished academic career, which is more than well-deserved.
