Four UNM Faculty Receive Accolades for Published Works

Four fac­ulty from the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico Depart­ment of Soci­ol­ogy received acco­lades for their pub­lished works. Sharon Erick­son Nept­stad and Howard Wait­zkin, recently won major national book awards; and Maria Velez and Christo­pher Lyons have an arti­cle set for pub­li­ca­tion in the Novem­ber issue of the jour­nal, Criminology.

Nepstad’s book, “Non­vi­o­lent Rev­o­lu­tions: Civil Resis­tance in the Late 20th Cen­tury” (Oxford U Press), won the 2012 Out­stand­ing Book Award from the Amer­i­can Soci­o­log­i­cal Association’s sec­tion on Peace, War and Social Con­flict. The book exam­ines the dif­fer­ent out­comes of non­vi­o­lent civil­ian move­ments high­light­ing Tianan­men Square and the East Ger­man uprising.

Nep­stad, chair of soci­ol­ogy, received her Ph.D. from the Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado and com­pleted post-doctoral stud­ies at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. She has been a vis­it­ing scholar at Notre Dame University’s Kroc Insti­tute for Inter­na­tional Peace Stud­ies. She has authored numer­ous arti­cles and books on social move­ments, civil resis­tance and religion.

“Med­i­cine and Pub­lic Health at the End of the Empire” (Par­a­digm Pub­lish­ers), which exam­ines cor­po­rate influ­ence on global health care, earned Wait­zkin the 2012 Frei­d­son Award, the
most pres­ti­gious award for a pub­li­ca­tion given by the Med­ical Soci­ol­ogy Sec­tion of the ASA.

Wait­zkin is dis­tin­guished pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus in the Depart­ment of Soci­ol­ogy and the School of Med­i­cine at UNM. He also prac­tices med­i­cine as a pri­mary care prac­ti­tioner in rural north­ern New Mex­ico. His work focuses on social con­di­tions that lead to ill­ness, unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing and early death.

Velez and Lyons col­lab­o­rated on “Neigh­bor­hood Hous­ing Invest­ments and Vio­lent Crime in Seat­tle, 1981–2007″ (co-authored with Blake Bour­saw), an arti­cle which appears in the Novem­ber 2012 issue of Crim­i­nol­ogy, the lead­ing jour­nal in the field.