Professional Announcements

The Department of Sociology is pleased to announce that Laura Chandler and Lianna Hart have received the 2007 C. Wright Mills Award for Sociological Imagination. The Mills Award is bestowed upon the best student paper from the previous academic year (2006-07). The department decided to honor two students this year. Chandler received the award for her paper "Cohousing: Community Formation and Enactment" which she wrote for Sociology 498 (Senior Seminar, Spring 2007). Hart earned the award for her paper "Enacting Ideologies: Autism and the Maternal Role" which she wrote for Sociology 495 (Special Study, Fall 2006, Spring 2007).

Hart will also receive the Pacific Sociological Association's 2008 Distinguished Undergraduate Student Paper Award for a paper entitled "Therapeutic Mothering: Maternal Practices as an Autism Intervention." Hart receives the award at the PSA meetings in Portland (April 10-13) and will also present the paper there. Kathy Charmaz, Melinda Milligan, and Cindy Stearns, who worked with Hart on the larger research project of which the paper is a part and who nominated her for the award, will be at the awards ceremony to celebrate with her. Hart graduated from SSU in May 2007 with a double major in Women's and Gender Studies and Psychology and a minor in Sociology. She begins a Ph.D. program in Sociology in the fall.

Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, History, has been invited by the American University of Beirut to give a talk on Wednesday, April 16 from her recently published book entitled "So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico." The title of the talk is: "The Lebanese Abroad: Leaving and Locating the Levant in Mexican History." She will also be a keynote speaker at Cal State Fullerton's Latin American Studies Asian Diaspora Conference on Friday, May 2.