Luttrell Honored with an ASA Award

Aronson Associate Professor Wendy Luttrell has been presented the Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship Award by the American Sociological Association at their annual meeting this past weekend. The recognition, from the ASA Section on Race, Gender, and Class, is for her book Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race, and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens.

Luttrell's research focuses on how schools shape gender, race, class, and sexual identities and self-understandings. Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds, an ethnographic study of pregnant teenagers enrolled in a special public school program, examines the ways pregnant teens are stigmatized and demonstrates how this marginalization affects their educational experiences. The book also describes how these experiences--along with the greater cultural discourse on teenage sexuality, unwed motherhood, race, and class--influence the girls' own self-images.

"Last year at the annual meeting of the ASA, then-president Michael Buroway called for a ‘public sociology'--a discipline more engaged with solving social problems and linking with artists, activists, educators, and policymakers who strive to make social change," said Luttrell. "I am especially honored that my book was recognized in this year and spirit. The fact that the association's section on Race, Class, and Gender acknowledged the book is of special significance to me, because the inseparability of these forces of social inequality and their everyday effects on individuals has been the focus of my work."

Luttrell stresses the importance of reflexivity and imagination in conducting research, and sees the potential for empowerment and social change through research relationships. Her first book, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women's Identity and Schooling, also won an American Sociological Association book award in 1998.

One of the ways Luttrell gathered data for Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds was to have the girls in the study participate in several art exercises where they cut up pages of fashion magazines and created collages that illustrated their individual self-presentations.

"Girls who get pregnant at young ages face tremendous difficulties," Luttrell explained. "The way in which the ‘problem' is framed has a great deal to do with how we go about solving it, and the current way the problem is framed is to focus on the girl--her inadequacies, failures, doomed future--and not on her capacities. This was why I put the girls in charge of their own self-representations, as a way both to understand how they saw themselves and to support their capacities, creativity and urge to be seen and recognized by others on their own terms."

Luttrell, who has a Ph.D. from the University of California, has been teaching at the Ed School since 1999. This academic year she will be teaching courses on the logics of qualitative research, and gender and education.