Tim Hallett has been appointed as the director of the Liberal Arts and Management Program. Tim was also inducted into the Sociological Research Association at ASA this August.

Pamela Braboy Jackson was selected for the 2024 ASA Medical Sociology Reeder Award.

Drawing upon interviews with working-class Mexican and Korean American language brokers, as well as healthcare providers, and months of participant observation in a Southern California police station, Kwon reveals how children of immigrants translate more than simple verbal exchanges. Living at the intersection of multiple forms of inequality, these youth creatively use their in-between status to resolve structural problems to ensure their families’ basic citizenship rights are upheld in interactions with teachers, social workers, landlords, doctors, and police officers. In an era of widespread racialized nativism, Language Brokers provides a critical examination of American culture, laying bare the contradictions between the ideals of equality and the exclusion of immigrants. Kwon underscores that dichotomous and racialized understandings of “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants—which are embedded in everyday interactions and institutional practices—inform the routine ways in which immigrant youth attempt to cultivate belonging for their families.

Jane McLeod is delighted to return to the department after serving four years as Executive Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences. She is busy catching up with her colleagues and catching up on all of the academic writing she hasn’t been doing, especially related to her NIH-funded project (with Andy Halpern-Manners) on autistic college students. She remains grateful for the project team (Syndee Knight, Elizabeth Anderson, Drew Myers, Yunmyung Cho, and the many graduate and undergraduate student coders) who kept the project afloat while she was writing policy, memoranda of understanding, and emails.

Patricia McManus Patricia McManus has two ongoing projects. One on the labor market outcomes of US immigrants. A second, together with Muna Adem and Tamara van der Does, investigates the social and political attitudes of immigrant youth in Europe.  Their paper on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes among youth in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden appears in the June issue of Social Forces.

Beyond the book, I’ve been continuing my efforts to advance science to improve suicide prevention, particularly in schools. Specifically, (1) I wrapped up my fieldwork in Colorado with my NIH-funded Social Worlds & Youth Well-Being Study (which aimed to identify effective, sustainable, and compassionate suicide prevention strategies in schools). We delivered our final report and recommendations to the school district and gave series of community talks to ensure all constituents had ample time to ask questions and discuss the research findings.

(2) Through the Irsay Institute, Bernice and I have also continued organizing the Innovation Think Tank for Suicide Prevention in Indiana. In September, we hosted a wonderfully generative conference on suicide prevention that brought together scientists, state-level public health officials, and community practitioners to stimulate policy-relevant research for the State of Indiana.

Beyond research, my first IU doctoral advisee (co-advised with Jess Calarco) – Katherine Beardall – successfully defended her dissertation in Spring 2024 and is off to a fantastic job at the U.S. Census. Super proud of Katie!!

Brian Powell was honored with the 2024 Cooley Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Social Psychology. You can read more about it here.

Celene Reynolds won awards for best article from ASA's Law and Society section and the historical/comparative section.