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Please nominate candidates for ESS’s Two Awards for Public Sociology -- One for Early Career and one for Mid-or-Later Career Scholars.
ESS has just created two new awards for the ESS for Public Sociology, one for early career and another for mid-or later career scholars. The intent in these awards is to recognize sociologists who have both done cutting-edge sociological research and engaged in meaningful public work using that research. Meaningful public work here includes high profile public dissemination, such as Op-Eds or public media appearances, but especially values sustained public work that uses sociological skills and research in ways that help organizations or persons with which the scholar works, helps resist policies by institutions or government that cause harm and promote policies that help people, direct service to research participants, and in other ways.
The ESS Public Sociology Award for Early Career Scholars recognizes pre-tenure scholars – including graduate students, untenured professors, or non-tenure track scholars early in their careers (about 8 years since getting the Ph.D.) – whose sociological work and practice has demonstrated a commitment and contribution to public sociology that improves public welfare, broadly understood, or the lives of research participants, or helps organizations with which they work.
The ESS Public Sociology Award for Mid-or-later Career Scholars recognizes tenured professors or more senior non-tenure track scholars on the same criteria.
The rationale for having two awards is that early career scholars are at a disadvantage for such awards when competing with mid-or-later career scholars, who have both more years of work and are past the pressures of the tenure process. The goal of these awards is not to pick a single “best” public sociologist, but rather to recognize public sociology’s value and to create signals to tenure granting and other institutions that may help those engaging in it in their careers. Academia’s current structure strongly disincentivizes such public sociology, which is one factor making sociology less relevant to public life than it has been in the past. These awards seek to support public sociology and those doing it.
Please email your nominations with supporting packets to the 2022 Public Sociology Awards Committee: Rob Smith ([email protected]), Daina Harvey ([email protected]), and Laurel Smith-Doerr ([email protected]) by January 24, 2022. Nominations should be made in a letter to the committee outlining the types of public sociology the person has done, including impacts it may have had (on debate about the issues, changes to policy or practice, or aid to organizations or persons, etc.) Supporting materials can include publications, but also letters from people who know the candidate's public work, including other academics, organizational or community members or leaders, or others. Preference will be given to candidates who are ESS members. Nominators need not be ESS members.
2022 THEME:
Strategic Sites and Ways for Sociology to Fight Inequality and Injustice
Robert Smith, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, ESS President
The theme for the 2022 Eastern Sociological Society Meetings is “Strategic Sites and Ways for Sociology to Fight Inequality and Injustice”. The emphasis on strategic sites, first, invokes Robert Merton’s prescription that sociological research should seek out strategic sites and contexts that show social processes, such as inequality or injustice, with particular clarity. Second, this emphasis invites sociologists to identify and engage with strategic sites in the world -- in their institutions and beyond -- where their research can help fight the increasing inequality and injustice we confront today. Third, the 2022 ESS Meetings seek to promote public sociology and effective strategic intervention by sociologists and their organizational or practitioner partners.
We live in times of increasing inequality and injustice, where our institutions and political system seem incapable of taking necessary steps to fight universal problems, like climate change, political polarization, or inequality, or to defend or expand the rights of targeted groups, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, labor organizations, racial or ethnic groups or others, or to address the demands of social movements such as MeToo or BLM. Sociological analysis can help understand and fight such problems. A key goal for ESS 2022 is to highlight and promote such public sociological work.
Planning on attending in-person? Please consider staying at our conference hotel, The Boston Park Plaza. We are contractually obligated to book a minimum number of guest rooms. The reservation link is: https://book.passkey.com/e/50223846
PLEASE SEE THESE IMPORTANT COVID-19 PRECAUTIONS MANDATED BY THE CITY OF BOSTON here.
Questions? [email protected]
Thank you for your support of, and membership in, ESS. We look forward to seeing you!
See Pricing here
March 10-13, 2022, Boston Park Plaza Hotel
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