Read SALC member Stacy Marlena Torres’ recent Oped on age transitions in LA’s Skid Row.
Newsletter, Summer 2016
The Summer 2016 issue of the Section on Aging and the Life Course Newsletter is now available! In this issue you will find…
- news from SALC Chair Jeylan Mortimer
- the SALC 2016 election results and award winners
- information on SALC sessions at the 2016 ASA meetings in Seattle
- five questions answered by new council members Tyson Brown and Cathy Liu
- …and much more.
You can access it on the Newsletter page by clicking here.
Full program for SALC at ASA
Section on Sociology of Aging and the Life Course (SALC)
2016 Annual Meeting Program
Theme: Challenges and New Directions in Life Course Studies
Saturday, August 20 *** SALC Section Day ***
7-8:15 am SALC Council Meeting
8:30- 10:10 Life Course Research and Social Policy
Organizer: Madonna Harrington Meyer
Discussant: Jacqueline Angel
- Lags and Leaps: The Dynamics of Demography, Economy, and Policy and the Implications for Life Course Research. Angela O’Rand and Amie Bostic.
- Exploring Life Course and Network Mechanisms Underlying Prison-based Therapeutic
- Communities. Derek Kreager, Dana Haynie, David Schaefer, Jacob Yang, Martin Bouchard, Michaela Sayer
- Transitions, Trajectories, and the Role of Activation Policies for Young People. Margherita Bussi
- School Wellness Policies and Adolescent Obesity: An Ecological Study. Rebecca Utz
10:30 am – 12:10 pm SALC Roundtables
Organizers: Carol Aneshensel and Andrew London
(14 tables, 52 papers)
2:30 – 4:10 pm Emerging Trends and Future Directions in Life Course Studies
Organizer: Jeylan Mortimer
- New Directions in Life Course Studies. Michael Shanahan
- Criminal Justice and the Life Course. Sara Wakefield and Robert Apel
- The Life Course and Mental Health. William Avison
- Neighborhood, Place, and the Life Course. Christopher Browning
- The Influence of Social Welfare Policies on Health Disparities across the Life Course. Pamela Herd
4:30- 5:30 pm. Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award Lecture
Presenter: Professor Debra Umberson, University of Texas-Austin
5:30-6:30 pm. SALC Business Meeting
6:45-9 pm. SALC Reception and Mentoring Dinner
Organizer: Madonna Harrington Meyer
The Paris Ballroom at Hotel Monaco. 1101 Fourth Avenue, Seattle
Sunday, August 21
10:30-12:10 Life Course Construction in Challenging Circumstances
Organizer: Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson
Discussant: Janel Benson
- Youth Survival Perceptions: Forecasts for Future Health. Naomi Duke
- Lost in the Big World? Adulthood Transition of Korean Transnational Migrants. Kirsten Song
- Daughters of the Great Recession: School, Work, and Family Pathways in the Transition to Adulthood. Jessica Hardie
- The Condensed Courtship Clock: How Elite Women Manage Self-Development and Marriage Ideals. Katherine Fallon and Casey Stockstill
Monday, August 22
2:30-4:30 Rethinking Social Movements in Relationship to Disability, Health, and Aging (co-sponsored with the Sections on Disability and Society and Medical Sociology)
Organizer: Robyn Brown
- Age Cohort Variation in Drinking among People with Physical Impairments: The Role of Politically-Oriented Coping. Judith Richman, Robyn Brown, Kathleen Rospenda
- Analyzing Disruptiveness in Disability Movements’ Protest Tactics Cross-Culturally. Sharon Barnartt
- Educating the Sighted: A Microsociological Study of Negotiations of a Contentious Strategy of Disability Simulation. Lisa Buchter
- Hegemonic or Queer? A Comparative Analysis of Five LGBTQIA/Disability Intersectional Social Movement Organizations. Justine Egne
ASA Program Update
A paper by O’Rand and Bostic has been added to the SALC Paper Session on Life Course Research and Social Policy.
Session organizer: Madonna Harrington Meyer, Syracuse University
Discussant, Jacqueline L. Angel, University of Texas at Austin
- O’Rand, Angela and Amie Bostic. “Lags and Leaps: The Dynamics of Demography, Economy, and Policy and Their Implications for Life Course Research.”
- Kreager, Derek A., et al. “Exploring Life Course and Network Mechanisms Underlying Prison-Based Therapeutic Communities.”
- Bussi, Margherita. “Transitions, Trajectories, and the Role of Activation Policies for Young People.”
- Utz, Rebecca L. “School Wellness Policies and Adolescent Obesity: An Ecological Study.”
Get Tickets to ASA Mentoring Dinner
Tickets for the SALC annual Award and Mentoring Dinner are now on sale! The dinner will be Saturday August 20, 6:45-9pm, at the Paris Ballroom of Hotel Monaco (1101 4th Ave, Seattle). The program is titled, “Getting a Job: Hunting, Interviewing, and Early Career Planning,” and will feature Patricia Thomas (Purdue), Lindsay Wilkinson (Baylor), and Pamela Herd (UWisconsin-Madison).
Ticket prices are $30 for faculty and $10 for students. We ask that you purchase tickets in advance. To purchase tickets for dinner, send checks made out to American 
Sociological Association to Madonna Harrington Meyer, 302 Maxwell Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY 13244.
When you arrive at the restaurant, your reservation will be checked and you will receive a ticket for one drink. You may purchase additional drinks from the cash bar.
SALC Award and Mentoring Dinner Committee: Madonna Harrington Meyer (chair), Stacy Torres and Adriana Reyes (student representatives), Jerald Herting (local representative), and Janet Wilmoth (past chair).
For more information, see the earlier blogpost on the 2016 mentoring dinner.
2016 Award Winners Announced
Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award
Madonna Harrington Meyer
Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Syracuse University
Madonna has accumulated more than two decades of sociological research on retirement and later-life economic well-being, particularly through the lens of the gendered welfare state. Her work has made critical contributions across research, theory, and policy analysis. The committee was especially laudatory regarding her involvement with national policy initiatives, putting her own research to work for the improvement of the lives of older adults. Her recent book with Pamela Herd, Market Friendly or Family Friendly? earned critical acclaim, including the Kalish Book Award from the Behavioral and Social Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America. In addition, Madonna has a named Professorship in the area of teaching and has been an active contributor to the professional organizations of our discipline, including SALC. As one committee member described it, Madonna is “the total package.”
Best Publication Award
Corey Abramson (University of Arizona), The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years (Harvard University Press, 2015).
This well-written and engaging book chronicles a study of the ways in which inequalities earlier in life shape not only diversity in well-being in old age, but also the differential ability of older persons to bring resources to bear to deal with problems. The challenges that aging brings touch everyone, but people respond differently depending on their social locations. This book examines both cultural and structural influences on the end of life in a carefully designed ethnographic study of older Americans living in more and less advantaged neighborhoods. The study makes new and important about cumulative advantages and the pathways through which it shapes aging in U.S. society. The work is nuanced and insightful, and its contributions to the literatures on aging and the life course are impressive.
Graduate Student Paper Award
Katherine Fallon and Casey Stockstill (Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) for their paper, “The Condensed Courtship Clock: How Elite Women Manage Self-Development and Marriage Ideals.”
In this intellectually creative paper, the authors examine how young adult women negotiate societal expectations of marriage-formation with aspirations for professional achievement. Based on interview data with college-educated women over the age of 25, the study exposes a “time crunch,” what the authors call a condensed courtship clock, wherein subjects create a timeline to try to fulfill competing personal and social expectations. But society has not yet calibrated such a clock effectively. When women fall “off time” for marriage, they doubt their own development as a full adult, and they understand this as an explicit trade-off for relational success. The authors argue that while professional opportunities for women have expanded, both in type and in time to achieve them, marriage remains a prime marker of adult status—an expression of class-based beliefs about women’s ideal lives. Consequently, even among contemporary society’s members best positioned for professional achievement, courtship clocks hamper women’s self-understandings and often eclipse a realization of professional goals.
SALC Election Results
Our 2016-17 incoming elected officers are:
- Chair-Elect: Pamela Herd (Univ of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Secretary-Treasurer: Debra Street (SUNY-Buffalo)
- Council (three-year terms): Tyson Brown (Vanderbilt) and Cathy Liu (Michigan State)
- Student Representative to Council (two-year term): Rebecca Wang (Syracuse)
Pamela, Debra, Tyson, Cathy, and Rebecca will join chair-elect Jessica Kelley-Moore and current council members Carol Aneshensel, Kristen Schulz Lee, Andrew London, and Jennifer Karas Montez. We are grateful to the service of the elected council members who will be transitioning out of their roles this August: Deborah Carr, Jill Suitor, John Reynolds, and Anbdrea Willson. Thanks as well go to all of the candidates who stood for election.
Paper Award: National Center of Competence in Research LIVES
In order to stimulate advances in the areas of vulnerability and life course studies, the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research LIVES (NCCR LIVES) encourages early career scholars to apply to the LIVES Best Paper Award 2016.
A sum of 2000 € will be granted to the winner. In addition to the award, the winner will be invited to join the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (SLLS) conference and will have her/his travelling expenses, conference and hotel fees (up to 3 nights) covered.
For more details and for applying to the award please visit the following link: www.lives-nccr.ch/en/award
Call for Papers: PSID Data User Conference
September 15-16, 2016, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
PSID announces a call for papers for the first PSID Annual Data User Conference. We invite submissions on any topic that use data from PSID or one of its major supplements, such as the Child Development Supplement, the Transition into Adulthood Supplement, the Disability and Use of Time supplement, the Family Rosters and Transfers Module, or the Childhood Retrospective Circumstances Study. Scholars from all disciplines are welcome.
Between 15 and 25 papers and posters will be accepted for the conference. Travel and lodging expenses will be available for one author per accepted paper or poster. Meals will be provided for all participants.
Proposals (1,000 words or less) will be accepted until June 17, 2016 through the online application portal.
Support for this event is provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Aging, and the National Science Foundation.
Mentoring Dinner Donations Sought
Mark your calendars! The SALC reception and mentoring dinner will be held on Saturday August 20, 6:45-9 pm at Seattle’s Hotel Monaco, in the Paris Ballroom. Hotel Monaco is located at 1101 4th Avenue, Seattle, WA. http://www.monaco-seattle.com/downtown-seattle-map-directions/.
In addition to drinks and a buffet dinner featuring Pacific Northwest fare, the evening will include a short program entitled, “Getting a Job: Hunting, Interviewing, and Early Career Planning, ” which is being organized by student council representatives Stacy Torres and Adriana Reyes. We will also be celebrating our section award winners, including our Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar.
Tickets must be purchased in advance and information about the ticket sales will be available in July. We are currently seeking donations so that we can provide a special and affordable student rate for this event. To indicate your willingness to make a pledge for this event, please send an e-mail to salc-mentor@maxwell.syr.edu. As soon as we receive word of your pledge, Madonna Harrington Meyer will email an invoice. All individual donations are tax-deductible; we will provide a receipt for tax purposes.
Jeylan Mortimer
Chair, ASA Section on Aging and the Life Course
Madonna Harrington Meyer
Chair, Committee on Mentoring and Professional Development, SALC
ASA Section on Aging & the Life Course 