ACLS News

Four Awards for Book Based on ACLS-Funded Research by Javier Auyero F'08

ACLS congratulates Javier Auyero F'08 on the success of his book, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown, co-authored with Débora Alejandra Swistun and published by Oxford University Press in 2009. The book describes Flammable, an impoverished "neighborhood-turned-industrial-zone" on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and explores both the residents' lived suffering and the "manifold ways in which residents make sense of their fragile, vulnerable condition."

The Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association recognized Flammable with the 2010 The Robert E. Park Best Book Award, and the ASA's Collective Behavior and Social Movements section awarded it the 2010 Charles Tilly Best Book Award. In addition, Flammable has won the Eastern Sociological Society's 2010 Komarovsky Book Award and the Association for Humanist Sociology's 2009 Best Book Award. The American Sociological Association is an ACLS member society.

Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. As a 2008 ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellow, he studied the life-threatening effects of environmental contamination on the Flammable shantytown and the meanings its residents ascribe to it.