Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson has been awarded the American Society of Criminology's 2025 Edwin H. Sutherland Award for the broad impact of his ethnographic research into city life and the origins of urban crime in the United States.
The annual award recognizes outstanding scholarly contributions to theory or research in criminology on the origins of criminal and deviant behavior, the criminal justice system, corrections, law, or justice.
"Few scholars have shaped how we think about criminology, urban sociology, urban ethnography, and criminal legal research as much as Professor Anderson," stated the award committee.
In awarding the prize to Anderson, the committee highlighted the breadth of his scholarship and his decades-long commitment to addressing inequality, structural racism, and crime and violence.
Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is one of the country's leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists. Each of his five books builds upon the previous one, forming a detailed cultural history of the country's urban landscape.
As a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, he studied street corner life at "Jelly's," the name he gave to a bar/liquor store located on Chicago's South Side, visiting the setting nightly for nearly three years to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse group of Black men he met there. This qualitative fieldwork provided the basis for his widely acclaimed first book, "A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men" (University of Chicago Press, 1978), which vividly depicts how the men he observed at Jelly's came together and made and remade their social status in the eyes of the others, revealing a complex social order regulated in part by violence.
His next book, "Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community" (University of Chicago Press, 1990), was a study of gentrification, exploring race, class, and change in two Philadelphia neighborhoods, one Black and low-income and the other racially mixed but middle to upper income.
Anderson's 1999 book, "Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City" (W.W. Norton & Company), delineates the class and cultural divide present in Philadelphia inner-city neighborhoods formed between the codes that regulate violence and often reward destructive behavior and the code of decency imparted by law-abiding, strong, loving families.
Last year, the journal Annual Review of Criminology considered the legacy of "Code of the Street" 25 years after its publication, concluding that empirical scholarship has validated Anderson's theories and asserts that his analysis of the interactional rules for negotiating street violence in inner-city Philadelphia applies to other aspects of American life.
Anderson's 2011 book, "The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life" (W.W. Norton & Company), introduced the concept of "the cosmopolitan canopy" as an "island of racial civility in a sea of segregation" and provides detailed descriptions of everyday encounters between whites and Blacks of different social classes in public spaces in U.S. cities. It illustrates how people enact civility through nonverbal negotiation for the use of sidewalks, coffee shops, and other public spaces, creating a framework for understanding the circumstance in which racial comity prevails.
His most recent book, "Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022)," drew on his 40-plus years of qualitative fieldwork, including many interviews, his previous books of urban ethnography, and his own experiences to document the challenges Black people face as they navigate "white space" - a perceptual category, defined by the overwhelming presence of white people and the relative absence of Blacks - and their struggle to overcome stereotypes that stigmatize them.
In 2021, Anderson was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the world's most prestigious in the field of criminology. Other awards and honors Anderson has earned include the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award and the W.E.B DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement, all from the American Sociological Association; the Eastern Sociological Society Merit Award; and the William Julius Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice from Washington State University.
