Sociology Professor receives the Wisconsin Sociological Outstanding Scholarship Award

Birzeit University Sociology Professor Laura Khoury has been selected as the 2017-2018 receipt of the Wisconsin Sociological Association’s William H. Sewell Outstanding Scholarship Award. The award acknowledges and honors professors with records of outstanding scholarly accomplishments in sociology.

There are four accomplishments that are considered evidence of outstanding scholarly work: excellence in basic sociological research; excellence in applied sociological research; excellence in the scholarship of teaching; and excellence in development of creative undergraduate research activities and projects.

The award is named for Professor William H. Sewell, who became the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War and student protests. After a difficult tenure due to the protests against US war in Vietnam, in June 1968, he resigned as chancellor and returned to research and teaching. 

Professor Khoury expressed her pride in winning the award, “I am very obliged with this award which aligns with Swell’s belief in the value of integrity, justice and equality. I see my research moving from surveillance studies (2005-2013), where I invested much in the area of racial profiling, to subaltern studies (2014-2018) as I am currently researching indigenous knowledges using a participatory approach in my research."

Laura Khoury is a Professor of Sociology at the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Birzeit University in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). She was the director of the Center for Women’s Studies, and the Center for Development Studies, Birzeit University. She was an editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) and has research interests in both minorities and development areas. Her publications include: ‘History and Race Consciousness in the Arab world: Colonial Capitalism and the Construction of Race’ (co-authored 2004, in K. Rhodes, ed., Race and Identity in the Nile Valley); ‘Women in the United States of America: The Struggle for Economic Citizenship’ (2005, in Billson and Fluehr-Lobban, eds, Female Well-Being: Toward a Global Theory of Social Change around the World in the 20th Century); and ‘Ethno-Racial Profiling and State Violence in a Southwest Barrio’ (co-authored Spring 2009 in AZTLAN: A journal of Chicano Studies at UCLA -which won a prestigious LASO award); ‘Racial Profiling as Dressage: A Social Control Regime’ (2009., In African Identities. Vol. 7 (1): 55–75); Hizbollah’s War of Positions: The New Arab- Islamic Praxis. (co-authored 2009 in Arab World Geographer. Vol. 12 (3-4): 136–149); among others. She has two forthcoming publications: one on language and the other on gender, and she is a chief editor of the prestigious Sociological Imagination refereed Journal.