ASA Theory Section

Theory Prize

co-winner: McCarthy, Michael. The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It). London: Verso, 2025.

co-winner: Edwards, Zophia. Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025.

honorable mention: Friedman, Brittany. Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025.

honorable mention: Strand, Michael, and Omar Lizardo. Orienting to Chance: Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting

winner: Ellis P. Monk, Harvard University

Junior Theorist Award

winner: Acosta, Laura. “Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War.” American Sociological Review 90 (2025): 947–84.

honorable mention: Cheong, Amanda R. “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar.” Social Problems 72 (2025): 341–57.

honorable mention: Husain, Fauzia. “Palestinian Sumud: Towards a Southern Theory of Unsettled Times.”

Best Graduate Student Paper Prize

winner: Fietz, Daphne. “Moral Adaptation: Sustaining Climate Activism When Futures Fail.”

honorable mention: Lurie, Margot. “Toward a Theory of State Environmental Violence.”