UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our June 2024 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Abigail Andrews
Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award 2024, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association Section on Sex and Gender
Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award 2024, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association Latina/o Sociology Section
Abigail Andrews is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program. She researched this book together with thirty-one Latinx students.
Banished Men: How Migrants Endure the Violence of Deportation
What becomes of men the U.S. locks up and kicks out? From 2009 to 2020, the U.S. deported more than five million people—over 90 percent of them men. In Banished Men, Abigail Andrews and her students tell 186 of their stories. How, they ask, does expulsion shape men’s lives and sense of themselves? The book uncovers a harrowing carceral system that weaves together policing, prison, detention, removal, and border militarization to undermine migrants as men. Guards and gangs beat them down, till they feel like cockroaches, pigs, or dogs. Many lose ties with family. They do not go “home.” Instead, they end up in limbo: stripped of their very humanity. Against the odds, they fight for new ways to belong. At once devastating and humane, Banished Men offers a clear-eyed critique of the violence of deportation.
Lucia Carminati
Lyman Book Award for World Maritime History 2023
North American Society for Oceanic History
Lucia Carminati is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor’s role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said’s residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal’s northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants’ prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal’s making.
Shannon Cram
National Indie Excellence Award (Environment Category) Finalist 2024
National Indie Excellence Awards
Shannon Cram is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility
What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its institutional capacities. Cram examines the embodied uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that endeavor. In particular, this lyrical book engages in a kind of narrative contamination, toggling back and forth between cleanup’s administrative frames and the stories that overspill them. It spends time with the statistical people that inhabit cleanup’s metrics and models and the nonstatistical people that live with their effects. And, in the process, it explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative condition.
Anna Gjika
Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award 2024
American Sociologigical Association Sex and Gender Section
Anna Gjika is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age
Stories of teen sexting scandals, cyberbullying, and image-based sexual abuse have become commonplace fixtures of the digital age, with many adults struggling to identify ways to monitor young people’s digital engagement. In When Rape Goes Viral, Anna Gjika argues that rather than focusing on surveillance, we should examine such incidents for what they tell us about youth peer cultures and the gender norms and sexual ethics governing their interactions. Drawing from interviews with teens and high-profile cases of mediated juvenile sexual assault, Gjika exposes the deeply unequal and heteronormative power dynamics informing teens’ intimate relationships and online practices, and she critically interrogates the role of digital cultures and broader social values in sanctioning abuse. The book also explores the consequences of social media and digital evidence for young victim-survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault, detailing the paradoxical capacities of technology for social and legal responses to gender-based violence.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza
Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award Honorable Mention 2024
American Sociological Association, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section
Robert E. Park Award 2024
American Sociological Association Community and Urban Sociology Section
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza is the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center and a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of five books that engage with issues such as racism, immigration policy, human rights, and race in Latin America.
Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap
Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation’s “murder capital” and incarceration capital, and why it is now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities.
Jessica Halliday Hardie
William J. Goode Book Award 2024
American Sociological Association Family Section
Jessica Halliday Hardie is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and faculty affiliate at the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research.
Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times
Given the range of possibilities open to women today, what futures do adolescent girls dream of and pursue? And how do social class and race play into their trajectories? In asking young women about their aspirations in three areas—school, work, and family—Best Laid Plans demonstrates how future plans are framed by notions of gendered responsibilities and abilities. Through her examination of the lives of poor, working-class, and middle-class Black and White young women as they navigate the transition to adulthood, sociologist Jessica Halliday Hardie defines anew what it means for young women to come of age. In particular, Hardie shows how social capital, either possessed or lacked, is not simply a resource for planning for the future but a structure whose form and function varies by social class and race. As these inequalities persist into adulthood, high aspirations, social capital, and careful planning bolster some young women while hindering others.
Jarrod Hore
W.K. Hancock Prize Shortlist 2024
Australian Historical Association
Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism
Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.
Joan Kee
Robert Motherwell Book Award 2024
Dedalus Foundation
Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method and Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America.
The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity
The Geometries of Afro Asia breaks down this relationship and chronology into points, angles, and trajectories. Spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Kee looks at the relationships that formed between Black and Asian artists at critical historical junctures—from civil rights struggles in the United States and the development of South Korea amid US military occupation in the 1960s and 1970s to debates over multiculturalism and critiques of globalization in the 1990s and 2010s. Through geometry, a language of magnitudes and alignments, Kee opens up new ways of seeing how artworks shape our lives and politics by getting us to commit some of our most valuable resources—time and attention—to one another.
Joya Misra and Kyla Walters
Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention 2024
American Sociological Association Section on Inequality, Poverty & Mobility
Race, Gender and Class Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Honorable Mention 2024
American Sociological Association Race, Gender, and Class Section
Joya Misra is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She studies inequality from an intersectional perspective, including within workplace organizations. She has published in an array of journals and had coedited three books.
Kyla Walters is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. She studies race, gender, labor, and education politics using qualitative methods. She has published in journals such as Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and in several edited volumes.
Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work
In malls across the United States, clothing retail workers navigate low wages and unpredictable schedules. Despite these problems, they devote time and money to mirror the sleek mannequins stylishly adorned with the latest merchandise. Bringing workers’ voices to the fore, sociologists Joya Misra and Kyla Walters demonstrate how employers reproduce gendered and racist “beauty” standards by regulating workers’ size and look. Interactions with customers, coworkers, and managers further reinforce racial hierarchies. New surveillance technologies also lead to ineffective corporate decision-making based on flawed data. By focusing on the interaction of race, gender, and surveillance, Walking Mannequins sheds important new light on the dynamics of retail work in the twenty-first century.
Sean Nesselrode Moncada
LASA Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies 2024
Latin American Studies Association
Sean Nesselrode Moncada is Associate Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela
Venezuela’s turbulent twentieth century saw boom and bust as the former Spanish colony transformed into a major postwar cultural player. In this sweeping study of visual and material production, Sean Nesselrode Moncada explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. An innovative, transdisciplinary reevaluation of Venezuelan modernism, Refined Material reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another.
Victor Roy
Donald W. Light Award for Applied Medical Sociology Honorable Mention 2024
Medical Sociology Section of American Sociological Association
Victor Roy, MD, PhD, is a family physician, sociologist, and a fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University.
Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines
Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.
Chelsea Schields
Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award 2024
Caribbean Studies Association
Chelsea Schields is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean
Offshore Attachments reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Historian Chelsea Schields demonstrates how Caribbean people both embraced and challenged efforts to alter intimate behavior in service to the energy economy. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.
Elena Shih
Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award Shortlist 2023
American Sociologigical Association Sex and Gender Section
Global and Transnational Sociology Best Scholarly Book Prize 2024
Global and Transnational Sociology Section of ASA
Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low‑wage women’s work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. Manufacturing Freedom is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. In this innovative study, Elena Shih argues that anti‑trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption.
Jaclyn Wong
Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention 2024
American Sociological Association
Jaclyn S. Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.
Equal Partners?: How Dual-Professional Couples Make Career, Relationship, and Family Decisions
Drawing on six years of interviews with the partners in twenty-one different-gender couples, Jaclyn S. Wong documents how supportive workplaces, partners’ steadfast gender-egalitarian attitudes, and partners’ jointly coordinated actions all need to come together for couples to experience gender equality in work and family. This book offers a compelling study of the dynamics of couples in ambitious partnerships who aspire to equality as they navigate the external pressures that come with life planning.
