The Death and Life of the Single-Family House just won the Canadian Sociological Association‘s John Porter Tradition of Excellent Book Award. I’m truly honoured by this award, especially by the company it allows me and my book to keep! My thanks go out to the review committee, and also to my very supportive team at Temple University Press., especially the editors of the Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series.

I’m joined by three other members of the UBC Sociology Department on the list of awards handed out by CSA this year, including my good friend Sean Lauer who won the Angus Reid Applied Sociology award as a Practitioner. Incidentally, he and fellow faculty member Carrie Yodanis also have a book out this year, called Getting Married: The Public Nature of Our Private Relationships. Two of our graduate students, François Lachapelle and Patrick Burnett also won an award for their paper, “Canadianization Movement, American Imperialism, and Scholastic Stratification: Professorial Evidence from 1977 to 2017.” To be sure, this is important stuff (and I say that as an American immigrant to Canada and beneficiary of the processes described).

But back to the company my book gets to keep! Through the CSA Awards, I’m excited to discover Dalhousie Prof. Karen Foster‘s new book, Productivity and Prosperity: A Sociological History of Productivist Thought, published by the great team at Univ. of Toronto Press. (I’m also looking forward to reading their recently published Gentrifier, but that’s another story). Prof. Foster’s work looks right up my alley in terms of trying to get at how economic concepts like “productivity” get measured and talked about in ways that are both socially constructed (often in a problematic fashion) and also highly consequential in terms of how they shape public policy. Really cool stuff – I’m looking forward to reading it!

The list of past award winners of the John Porter Award also places my book in brilliant company. I’ve been longing to get a copy of Vic Satzewich‘s book, Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets In, from the excellent UBC Press, for quite some time now. This is an area of real interest to me (for instance, I regularly have students read some of the training documents for how immigration officers determine which marriages are “real”). Prof. Satzewich’s influential work has been cited by Canadian policy-makers in recent leadership debates (if wrongly), and it’s another I’m really looking forward to reading.

The rest of the list is equally as brilliant (Lesley Wood’s Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion ; Elke Winter’s Us, Them, and Others ; Andrea Doucet’s Do Men Mother? ; Kay Anderson’s Vancouver’s Chinatown – which I cite in my own book! – and many more besides! See the list to fill out your own bedside table).

Now I’ll go back to pettier concerns, like listening to myself repeat the phrase “my award-winning book” over and over again, and envisioning how it will look the next time I revise my CV and find myself with something lovely to plant in the vast, otherwise empty landscape of its “Awards” section.