UC Santa Cruz graduates lead major social science associations

UC Santa Cruz graduates are leading two major social science associations.

Annette Lareau (Merrill, '74, sociology), has been elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), the oldest and largest association of sociologists in the U.S.  Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, earned her Ph.D. in sociology from U.C. Berkeley. She is the author of Unequal Childhoods, Class, Race, and Family Life (University of California Press, 2011)

Carroll Seron (Cowell, '70, American Studies), is the current president the Law and Society Association, an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts. She earned her Ph.D. at New York University and  is professor and chair in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine where she holds a joint appointment in sociology and the school of law.  

Seron is author of The Business of Practicing Law: The Work Lives of Solo and Small-Firm Attorneys (Temple 1996) and, with Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Bonnie Oglesky and Robert Sauté, The Part-Time Paradox: Norms, Professional Life, Family, and Gender (Routledge 1999).

In addition to the two leadership positions with UCSC alums, UCSC sociology associate professor Steve McKay heads the Labor and Labor Movements section of the ASA, and associate professor Julie Bettie is a past head of the Sex and Gender section.

"This indicates the strong connections sociology has to the discipline, as well as growing interactions and authority in related multidisciplinary areas such as cultural studies, science studies, labor and urban studies," said Ben Crow, chair of UCSC's Sociology Department.

The American Sociological Association was founded in 1905 and currently has more than 13,000 members who come from academia, government and business. Lareau has completed extensive field work studying the daily lives of African-Americans and European-Americans, and is credited with coining the term "concerted cultivation," a style of parenting marked by a parent's attempts to foster their child's talents by incorporating organized activities in their children's lives. The concept refers to middle class child rearing practices.

Seron studies studies the organizations and professions of law. Her current work looks at the ssue of indebtedness on law students’ career paths. She has been a member of the Law & Society Association since 1977. She has also been active in the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA.