UC Merced’s Department of Sociology earned a quartet of awards at the American Sociological Society annual meeting, held this year in Montreal on Aug. 9-13.
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Professor Stephanie Canizales received an Early Career Award in the Children and Youth section.
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Professor Ed Flores received the Dan Clawson Activist-Scholar Award from ASA’s Labor and Labor Movements section.
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Professor Tanya Golash-Boza was honored with the Outstanding Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology section.
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An article by Professor Veronica Lerma received a Graduate Division Alumni Award.
Canizales was recognized for distinguished contributions to research, teaching and service. Candidates must have received their Ph.D. within 10 years of nomination. Canizales left the UC Merced faculty this fall to take a position at UC Berkeley.
Flores, a member of the UC Merced faculty, was recognized as an outstanding educator who engages in efforts for social change. The award’s namesake, the late Dan Clawson, was a longtime sociologist at the University of Massachusetts and a lifelong champion of social justice.
Award committee members said Golash-Boza’s 2023 book, “Before Gentrification: The Creation of D.C.’s Racial Wealth Gap,” reaches far beyond classic research into gentrification. “It demonstrates that a violent cycle of dispossession, displacement and disinvestment was followed by racialized reinvestment,” they wrote. “Black residents of Washington, D.C. were offered prisons as the sole solution to the problems they faced in their communities.”
Golash-Boza is on leave from the UC Merced faculty to serve as executive director of University of California’s student and faculty instructional and research center in Washington.
Lerma, who earned her doctorate at UC Merced and is on the sociology faculty at UC Davis, earned her award for a paper titled “Intersectional Criminalization: How Chicanas Experience and Navigate Criminalization through Interpersonal Relationships with Latino Men and Boys.”
