Social Science

Committee: Junaid Rana (chair), Shalini Shankar, Robyn Rodriguez

The committee is happy to announce Bindi Shah’s Laotian Daughters: Working toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice (Temple University Press, 2012) and Pawan Dhingra’s Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2012) as the joint winners of the Social Science Book Award. Each book represents an important intervention and trend within Asian American studies, the social sciences, and sociology in particular. Shah’s study of environmental justice activism from the vantage point of young women presents a rich ethnography into the complexity and art of political practice. By combining social movement analysis with youth and young girls’ activism, in particular that of Laotian teenagers in California, Shah documents how political mobilization is an act of critique and theorization that then leads to action. As such Shah provides a valuable and much needed study for those interested in youth activism and Southeast Asian American studies. Dhingra similarly provides a nuanced and accessible monograph of why and how Indian Americans became one of the largest ethnic groups to own motels in the United States. This gripping story complicates the narrative of Indian American often told from the vantage point of urban settings and through the counternarrative of ethnic entrepreneurship in rural Middle America. With complex renderings of the race, class, gender, and familial ties that make the dominance of middle-market motels possible, Dhingra probes a keen sociological eye over the Indian motel phenomenon by asking straightforward questions to complex and contradictory situations. While motel ownership certainly entails class and social mobility for Indian Americans, the hard lesson of how racism and inequality persist under the upwardly mobile conditions of self-ownership are amply described throughout this text. Both of these books represent important and hopeful work in Asian American studies that continues the commitment to social justice and scholarship that exposes inequality and racism.