Patricia Fernández-Kelly, a professor of sociology at Princeton, has received the 2020 ASA Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology from the American Sociological Association (ASA).
The award honors ASA members’ outstanding contributions to sociological practice, and it recognizes work that has facilitated, or served as a model for, the work of others in sociology or outside the discipline.
Fernández-Kelly, a social anthropologist with an interest in international economic development, gender, class and ethnicity, and urban ethnography, is a research associate at the Office of Population Research. She also is director of the Center for Migration and Development.
As part of her dissertation research in the late 1970s, Fernández-Kelly conducted a groundbreaking ethnography focusing on export-processing zones in Asia and Latin America. She is the author or co-author of 13 books, and she has written extensively on migration, economic restructuring, women in the labor force, and race and ethnicity.
With Lorraine Gray, Fernández-Kelly co-produced the 1986 Emmy-award winning documentary “The Global Assembly Line.”
She will be recognized by the ASA on Aug. 9 at the association’s annual meeting in San Francisco.