UB Sociologist Receives Top Book Award for 2001 in Field of Bigotry and Human Rights

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Sociologist Lois Weis of Buffalo, professor of comparative education in the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education, has received the 2001 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, one of the top awards in the human-rights field.

Weis and her co-author, social psychologist Michelle Fine, received the award for "Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class and Gender Among Urban Youth," published last year by Teachers College Press.

The Myers Outstanding Book Award annually honors particularly outstanding authors, books and publishers that advance understanding of bigotry and power imbalances in North America and propose ways to develop equitable future communities and societies.

"Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class and Gender Among Urban Youth" is a collection of essays by leading educators, psychologists, sociologists and human-rights advocates who implore educators, community activists, youth and youth workers to imagine environments for work with youth that don't rely on schools, families or religious institutions alone -- particularly now, in a time of what the authors call "shriveled state responsibility for youth and the evaporation of public spaces, especially for poor and working-class youth."

The book has received a great deal of critical acclaim as what Professor John U. Ogbu of the University of California-Berkeley called "a major contribution to ethnography of identity and an important work for policy and practice in the fields of education and youth."

Weis is the author of several important national studies about urban children, adolescents and women, some of which she co-authored with Fine, a professor of psychology in the CUNY Graduate Center doctoral program. They include "Unknown City" (Beacon Press, 1998), a groundbreaking, bleak and often heart-rending ethnography of unskilled, desperate and poverty-stricken young Americans living on this country's social and economic margins.

The authors' primary research interest is the study of social injustice, and they use both qualitative and quantitative methods to study social-justice issues in public high schools, prisons and with youth in urban communities. Typically, they employ participatory research methods insofar as they work with youth and/or activists, and draw from feminist, racial and other critical theories.

In addition to Weis and Fine, contributors to "Construction Sites" include A.A. Akom, Bernadette Anand, Nancy Barnes, Richard Barry, Linda Brodkey, Doris Carbonell-Medina, Sarah K. Carney, Craig Centrie, Colette Daiute, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Maxine Greene, Aída Hurtado, Carlton Jordan, Jennifer McCormick, Amira Proweller, Michael C. Reichert, Dana Sherman, Janie Victoria Ward and Constance Webster.

The Myers Center is named for Gustavus Myers, a distinguished historian and author whose pioneering historical analysis, "History of Bigotry in the United States" (1942), was undertaken at a time when bigotry popularly was believed to be an occasional event. The center challenges the far right wing and hate groups in particular, and is supported by a broad range of human-rights organizations, including the National Urban League, the B'nai B'rith, the NAACP and the Unitarian Universalist Association.

The book award has gone to some of the top human-rights authors in the United States, including Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union; Richard Delgado ("When Equality Ends: Stories About Race and Resistance"); Toni Cade Bambera ("These Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel"), and Michael Patrick Fitzgerald ("All Souls: A Family Story from Southie").