MARGARET ANDERSEN: Welcome. Welcome to the awards ceremony and presidential address of this year’s American Sociological Association annual meeting. I am Margaret Andersen from the University of Delaware, and it has been my great pleasure to serve this year as the ASA Vice President. In our usual tradition, we will take a minute to remember those who departed from us this year, and I would ask that you remain silent as their names scroll on the screens before you. Thank you. I am now turning the podium over to Rubén Rumbaut, who will begin the awards ceremony. RUBEN RUMBAUT: Thank you Maggie. Good afternoon. I am Rubén Rumbaut of the University of California at Irvine and the presider for this afternoon’s program. We just noticed that the program lists Mark Schneiberg as presider, but I am not Mark, although we both have advanced receding hairlines. Mark instead will be next year’s presider. But today, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the awards ceremony. As a Californian by choice and adoption, I have been asked to say a few words about San Francisco before introducing the nine ASA Awards that we will shortly announce and celebrate. This city, known in earlier incarnations as the “Paris of the West” and “Baghdad by the Bay” is a vibrant marvel of a global village wrapped in irony and paradox. If you weren’t a sociologist it would lure you into becoming one. If you weren’t already charmed by its beauty and its hills and its awesome bay, if not by its earthquake faults, and its fog, and the clever ditty wrongly attributed to Mark Twain that “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Born as a Spanish mission in the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, becoming part of Mexico in 1821, and of the U.S. after the war that ended in '48, and of the world after fortune seekers rushed in from everywhere when gold was discovered nearby a year later, San Francisco was once the largest city on the West Coast. It was reborn after being obliterated by the 1906 earthquake and fire just a year after the ASA was formed. And then, it was transformed again during and after WWII and ever since. San Francisco today is only the fourth most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose, and the thirteenth most populous in the country with a population of just over 800,000. But, it is the second most densely populated major city in the U.S. and the heart of the Bay Area, with more than seven million people. San Francisco is a minority-majority city, as is the entire state of California for that matter. Asian Americans make up a third of its population and San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest and largest in North America. More than a third of city residents were born outside the United States and, more remarkably, more than half of all the children, teenagers, and adults under 50 in the entire Bay Area are today of immigrant stock, either first or second generation. Disparities abound here. San Francisco ranks eighth among all major cities worldwide in the number of billionaires known to be living within city limits, but the city also has the highest number of homeless people per capita of any major U.S. city. A corporate power center and, for decades a Republican city, by the 1960s San Francisco had turned Democratic. In the 70s, it became a center of the gay rights movement with emergence of The Castro as an urban gay village. Today, it has the highest percentage of gays and lesbians of any of the largest U.S. cities and the Bay Area has the highest concentration of same-sex households of any metropolitan area. So, welcome to San Francisco. Perhaps you have already gone on this year’s local tours of the Mission District’s mural, The Longshore Strike, or Angel Island this morning or will be going on tomorrow morning’s tours of Manilatown and The Castro. There is enough here to keep all 45 ASA sections busy indefinitely. But right now, we have other business at hand. This is the ASA’s Annual awards ceremony: an important ritual in which we collectively recognize and honor outstanding sociological careers, scholarship, teaching, practice, and public service, exceptional achievements, which enrich us all. In honoring these individuals for the excellence of their work, we also define and validate the discipline and our profession’s collective story. The first award to be presented today is the ASA Dissertation Award, which honors the best Ph.D. dissertation from among those submitted by advisors and mentors in the discipline. Please welcome Robert Crosnoe as he highlights the award and the dynamic work of this year’s recipient. ROBERT CROSNOE: Thank you. The winner of this year’s award for best dissertation is “The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa” by Claire Decoteau, who wrote this as a graduate student at the University of Michigan and is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This is a 2-year ethnography that elegantly links the HIV pandemic and the political and economic restructuring of post-apartheid South Africa as a way of elucidating the many different ways that individuals can try and navigate the tricky relationship between indigenous healing practices and westernized medicine. In short, in today’s South Africa, many blacks go back and forth between indigenous and biomedical forms of healing, and Claire argues that this results from a hybrid identity in which a colonized population attempts to navigate the many obstacles put in its path by the false dichotomy between ideas of modern and traditional. It is also, interestingly enough, a way of extending a longstanding tradition into the post-apartheid era of using indigenous healing practices as a form of resistance against the dominant power structure. Now, some of the adjectives that the committee members used to describe this dissertation were, “provocative,” “groundbreaking,” “amazingly astute,” and “compassionate,” which was my favorite one. I think that is why we decided collectively that Claire’s dissertation really exemplified the spirit of this award and it is also why we predict that about 30 years from now she will be up here to receive another award for distinguished career contributions, but probably not from me. So, congratulations Claire. CLAIRE LAURIER DECOTEAU: When Rob first called me to tell me that I had received this award I was actually conducting further research in South Africa. I do research with HIV-infected residents of extremely impoverished squatter camps outside of Johannesburg. So, it was very important for me to be able to tell the people with whom I work, who have largely been mostly abandoned by their state, the healthcare system, and the world at large, that their story had been recognized in this important way. So, the first people that I would like to thank are Pheello Limapo, Thulani Skhosana for introducing me into their communities and for sharing their experiences of living with, and, dying of HIV and AIDS. I also have to thank my amazing interpreter and research assistant Torong Ramela. I want to of course thank Robert Crosnoe and the entire awards selection committee for choosing my project for this tremendous honor. I would like to thank the graduate students and the faculty at the University of Michigan for all of their support and encouragement over the years. I would like to thank my entire dissertation committee and in particular my chair George P. Steinmetz, who has always been a tremendous source of both support and inspiration, and I would like to end by of course thanking my partner, Andy Clarno. Thank you very much. RUBÉN RUMBAUT: The Jessie Bernard Award is given annually in recognition of a body of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society. If you missed it, the current issue of Footnotes has an excellent article on the significance of the Jessie Bernard Award by Patricia Yancey Martin. Please welcome Nancy Naples and Nikki C. Raeburn as they present this year’s recipient. NIKKI C. RAEBURN: Nancy and I are thrilled to co-present as co-chairs of the selection committee Cecilia Ridgeway with the Jessie Bernard Award. “Professor Ridgeway is Stanford University’s Lucie Stern Professor of Social Sciences, and she has furthered our understanding of gender inequality as much as or more than anyone else during the last half of the 20th century,” said one of her nominators. Making rare micro/macro links, she transformed scholarly thinking by illuminating how interactional processes preserve gender hierarchies. A path-breaking social psychologist, her status construction theory powerfully explains how a nominal characteristic like gender acquires status value and thus reproduces inequality. From her eloquent theoretical work, thoroughly convincing experimental studies, and steadfast mentoring, teaching, and professional service, to her social justice-minded contributions to the work place and legal arena, Professor Ridgeway has brought gender front and center, not only to basic theoretical concerns in the sociological discipline, but also to concrete policy considerations in the social world at large. Please join me in congratulating Cecilia Ridgeway. CECILIA RIDGEWAY: I know I can’t live up to that. Nevertheless, I am beyond honored by this award. I never expected it and I can’t express how appreciative I am of receiving it, but I do want to say that how society is organized by gender and gender inequality is one of the great sociological questions, as Jessie Bernard made clear to us.