Lauren Valentino

ASA DMSNS Section Calls for Award Nominations DMSNS James S. Coleman Award for Outstanding Article Deadline for Submissions: March 31, 2026 The section on Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society invites nominations (including self-nominations) for its Outstanding Article Award of theoretical or empirical articles addressing issues of decision-making, social networks, or more broadly entering the traditions of analytical and computational sociology. Eligible articles must have been published within the past two calendar years (2024 and 2025). Both faculty and graduate students are eligible for the award, but an article may not be submitted both to the section’s Outstanding Article Award and Best Graduate Student Paper Award. Co-authors share the award equally. Nominators should be members in good standing of the American Sociological Association. Nominations, including a .pdf version of the article, should be submitted to committee chair Lauren Valentino (lauren.valentino@unc.edu) and committee members Kevin Kiley (kkiley@ncsu.edu), Austin Van Loon (vanloon@mit.edu), and Linda Zhao (lindazhao@uchicago.edu) by March 31, 2026.

Please send us your nominations for the ASA Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society James Coleman Outstanding Article Award!

In #NewPublication @sociologylauren.bsky.social & @evangelinewarren.com find that labeling events as discrimination is related to self-rated health, but this relationship depends on how one defines discrimination-> bit.ly/3MSBoKZ
@uncchsociology.bsky.social @asamedsoc.bsky.social

Thanks Karen 😁

I'd love that!!!

Full list of incoming fellows, including project descriptions, here: www.russellsage.org/fellows/sear...

A list of the 19 incoming visiting scholars, including their headshots, names, and institutional affiliations: Gregory Acs, Urban Institute Omer Ali, University of Pittsburgh Tony Cheng, Duke University Bo Cowgill, Columbia University Peter Hepburn, Rutgers University–Newark Jelani Ince, University of Washington Elizabeth Jacobs, University of Connecticut Christine Jang-Trettien, City University of New York Gabriela Kirk-Werner, Syracuse University Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Rachel Meltzer, Cornell University Tali Mendelberg, Princeton University Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University Ryan Parsons, University of Mississippi Samuel Perry, University of Oklahoma Laurel Smith-Doerr, University of Massachusetts Amherst Mary Ellen Stitt, Rutgers University Lauren Valentino, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Caitlin Zaloom, New York University

I am so excited to be part of this incredible group of incoming Russell Sage Foundation @russellsagefdn.bsky.social Visiting Scholars.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Two real world examples of What to do with “Other, describe:” and coding protocols.
@gaylekaufman.bsky.social @sociologylauren.bsky.social

We’re hiring! The UNC-CH Sociology Department is looking for a Teaching Assistant or Associate Professor (3–3 load) to join our faculty. Great students, great department. Application review begins 2/16.

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/312...

Congrats to CPC Fellow and Assistant Professor of Sociology Lauren Valentino, who was selected for a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar Fellowship for the 2026-27 academic year!

Carolina Sociology is hiring!

• Tenure-track in computational sociology or advanced quantitative methods
• Open rank in population health.

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

UNC Psychology and Neuroscience SOCIAL ORG TALK September 29, 2025 12 pm Howell 205. "How Americans Define Racism, Sexism, and Classism." Lauren Valentino, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, UNC - Chapel Hill.

I'm giving a talk today to social psychologists! +1 for interdisciplinarity

More of our recent research, this time featured on The Society Pages!

A screenshot of the social science website contexts.org shows a photo of a person highlighting the word "racism" in pink in a dictionary and includes the title of the article, "Defining Discrimination Changes Policy Preferences." The byline reads, "By Parker Muzzerall."

Sociology quick-take! "Defining Discrimination Changes Policy Preferences" covers new @amjsoc.bsky.social research by @sociologylauren.bsky.social & @evangelinewarren.com on Americans' racism, sexism, & classism evaluation criteria & how they change opinions on redress contexts.org/articles/def...

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/303...

Tenure Track AP position at UNC's SILS.

"We seek a scholar whose research examines the complex interconnections between AI technologies and social, organizational, and/or ethical systems."

Due to the rescission of federal funding, North Carolina Public Radio is facing a major budget shortfall (roughly $800k). @wunc.org is the largest nonprofit newsroom in the state but also home to national programming. If you care about quality journalism, please give what you can www.wunc.org/donate

Looks great Tony! Your thinking on how the state engages in denials has some nice connections to Amanda Cheong's work about the ways the administrative state produces bureaucratic omissions.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Nice to see our recent AJS article featured in Contexts! @evangelinewarren.com

The program is free and open to all. We've heard from parents who say it's made a real difference for their kid. We'd been planning to apply for NSF funding to track the long-term effects on our program participants and... well... if anyone has suggestions for alternate funding sources, let me know!

For the GEM program, we invite local middle schoolers to campus over the summer, leading them in challenging math puzzles, and introducing them to women in STEM who are scientists, engineers, and clinicians. Our goal is to broaden the students' career horizons and boost their math confidence.

A group of middle schoolers watch a demonstration of electromagnetism.

A large and diverse group of middle schoolers, college students, and faculty are seated on the steps of a university campus in the summertime.

A group of middle schoolers look on as a cardiologist explains how physicians can image the heart using technology inspired by animals like bats and dolphins.

A group of middle schoolers jump for joy in front of the Duke University chapel.

GEM 2025 was a huge success! My two faculty colleagues in Engineering and Mathematics and I started a Duke-UNC collaboration seven years ago to promote diversity in STEM. This has been one of my favorite ways of putting my scholarly research into practice for the benefit of the local community.

Zero-sum or Coalition? A Dyadic Approach for Testing Discrimination’s Impact on Perceptions of Ethnoracial Outgroups - Evangeline Warren, Lauren Valentino, 2025 Intergroup relations research suggests that individuals perceive racial politics through a zero-sum framework, whereas scholarship on mobilization and social mo...

🚨New Pub Alert🚨

@sociologylauren.bsky.social and I have a new paper out in SRE today!

In "Zero-sum or Coalition? A Dyadic Approach for Testing Discrimination’s Impact on Perceptions of Ethnoracial Outgroups" we use perceptions of discrimination to examine racial group relations. Here's a 🧵!

Lignier, Wilfried. 2021. “Symbolic Power for Beginners: The Very First Social Efforts to Control Others’ Actions and Perceptions.” Sociological Theory 39(4):201-224. doi: 10.1177/07352751211050660.

I'm obsessed with this paper.

👏👏👏

Celebrating my first post-grad day with a paper with collaborator extraordinaire @sociologylauren.bsky.social accepted for publication in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity!

Our Annual Review of Sociology article on conceptualizing and measuring structural racism is now available.

Get it while studying racism is still legal. @tyson-brown.bsky.social @pahoman.bsky.social

(also, lots of great articles are in this volume).

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

So excited to see this in print! ✨

The Politics of Skin Tone A nuanced examination of the salience of skin tone within African American politics. Research shows that skin tone is associated with significant differences in life experiences. On average, African A...

Excited to share that my new book is now available for pre-order! This book has been a labor of love for the past decade & I am grateful to a whole community of people who supported this project.

Get 30% off your purchase using code UCPNEW at UChicago Press! Link: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Five photos of the four panelists from the session giving their presentations and answering questions during the Q&A

What a spectacular panel at #SSS2025 🔥🔥🔥 "Perceptions and Experiences of Discrimination and Microaggression" with @malissa-a.bsky.social @amiebostic.bsky.social @jessistreib.bsky.social @tianhao.bsky.social