Penn Sociology News

Courtney Boen has received the graduate student paper award from ASA's Section of Aging and the Life Course at the annual meeting in Montreal. Her paper is entitled, "The role of socioeconomic factors in Black-White health inequities across the life course: Point-in-time measures, long-term exposures, and differential health returns," and can be read here.

Earlier this month Amada Armenta published Protect, Serve, Deport with University of California Press. You can read more about Amada's publication here.

Steve Viscelli has been awarded three ASA Section Outstanding Book Awards for 2017 for The Big Rig. The awards are as follows:

- The Max Weber Book Award from the Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work, from the American Sociological Association
- The Outstanding Book Award from the Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility from the American Sociological Association
- Section on Labor and Labor Movements Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Award from the American Sociological Association

Courtney Boen, new sociology and demography faculty member, has been given funding from the annual Quartet Pilot Research Project Competition for her research entitled “Biological Risk, Physical Functioning and Psychosocial Stress Among Older-age Hispanics." You can read more about the project here.

Penn Sociology faculty Tukufu Zuberi, Amada Armenta, and Emilio Parrado talked with Omnia about their work on human migration and its complexity. You can read the full article, with quote from Hans-Peter Kohler, here.

Rachel Ellis, who will receive her Ph.D. in August 2017, has been awarded the 2017 Best Student Paper Award from the Section on the Sociology of Religion from the American Sociological Association. Her paper is titled "'You’re Not Serving Time, You’re Serving Christ': Neoliberal Religious Messages in the Shadow of Mass Incarceration."

Peter Harvey, Ph.D. Student, has received an honorable mention with ASA's Section on the Sociology of Religion for the 2017 Best Student Paper Award for his paper, "It's a Total Way of Life."

Dorothy Roberts, along with Sarah A. Tishkoff, has been working to quash the belief that race is determined biologically. She participated in a podcast that was featured in Penn News recently. You can read more information here, as well as listen to portions of their podcast with Wharton.

Benjamin Pollack, a rising College senior, wrote an abstract for an article on negotiating healthcare published in Publius Journal of Federalism earlier this month. The published abstract is below.

Negotiations between federal and state officials are a mainstay of intergovernmental relations, but the politics of negotiation have been largely understudied. In this article, we provide a window on those politics by examining the development of the Arkansas premium assistance waiver—an early and influential Medicaid waiver. We examine the leverage of both the federal and state governments in their efforts to reach agreement on a plan that suited both sets of actors. The federal government was providing funding important to the state, but the state had the capacity necessary to put a program in place. The federal government wanted some type of expansion in a Southern state; Arkansas wanted to do it “their way.” Also key to the Arkansas case is the persistence and shared vision of the federal and state actors who in the end trusted each other and produced a policy both were proud of.