The organization Sociologists for Women in Society has honored three women scholars for their work promoting women in academia and the field of sociology.
Brittany Pearl Battle, an assistant professor in the sociology department at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, won the Feminist Activism Award. Established in 1995, the award is presented annually to an SWS member who has notably and consistently used sociology to improve conditions for women in society. The award honors outstanding feminist advocacy efforts that embody the goal of service to women and that have identifiably improved women’s lives. Dr. Battle is a graduate of the University of Delaware. She earned a master’s degree in African American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Mary Romero won the Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award. The SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award was founded in 1985 as a way of recognizing members whose scholarship employs a feminist perspective, and of making this feminist scholar available to campuses that are isolated, rural, located away from major metropolitan areas, bereft of the resources needed to invite guest speakers, and/or characterized by hostility to feminist scholarship. Dr. Romero is professor emerita in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She served as the 110th president of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Romero is a graduate of Regis Univesity in Denver, where she majored in sociology and minored in Spanish. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado.
Heather Laube is the recipient of the Feminist Mentoring Award. She is an associate professor of sociology and core faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Michigan-Flint. In 2015, she taught and researched at Karl-Franzens University in Graz, Austria, as a Fulbright scholar. One aspect of her research focuses on how feminist academics find ways to remain true to their feminist ideals while also attending to the reality and goals of their professional lives. She has also examined how innovative faculty mentoring programs might contribute to institutional change in higher education.