Michael Harrington Book Award

The Michael Harrington Book Award recognizes an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle to making the study of political science relevant to building a more democratic and egalitarian economic, social, and political order.

2023 Recipient: Mark R. Warren
Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline

2023 Committee:
Sarah Surak (chair), Elizabeth McKenna, James Simmons

Willful Defiance documents how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country. The book begins in the Mississippi Delta where African American families were some of the first to name and speak out against the school-to-prison pipeline and challenge anti-Black racism, exclusionary discipline policies that suspend and expel students of color at disproportionate rates and policing practices that lead students into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The book examines organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, showing how groups led by parents and students of color built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by centering the participation of people most impacted by injustice and combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. It shows how an intersectional movement emerged as girls of color and gender nonconforming students asserted their voice, the movement won victories to remove or defund school police and sought to establish restorative justice alternatives to transform deep-seated racism in public schools. The book documents the struggle organizers waged to build a movement led by community groups accountable to people most impacted by injustice rather than Washington-based professional advocates. It offers a new model for federated movements that operate simultaneously at local, state, and national levels, while primarily oriented to support local organizing and reconceptualizes national movements as interconnected local struggles whose victories are lifted up and “nationalized” to transform racially inequitable policies at multiple levels.

Past Recipients
2022:
Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa
Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

2021: Albena Azmanova, University of Kent
Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. Columbia University Press, 2020.

2020: Rebecca Tarlau, Pennsylvania State University
Occupying Schools, Occupy Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education. Oxford University Press, 2019.

2019: Keisha Lindsay, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminism in All-Black Male Schools. University of Illinois Press, 2018.

2018: Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon & Economic Policy Institute
The One-Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. ILR Press, 2017.

2017: Peter Dauvergne, University of British Columbia
Environmentalism of the Rich. MIT Press, 2016.

2016: Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania
Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Additional Recipients »

Deadline for nominations: April 1, 2024

Nomination Instructions: All nominated books must have a 2023 publication date and cannot be an edited collection. Nominations must be made in writing to the committee chair by the publisher, and all five committee members must receive a copy of the book from the publisher at their mailing addresses listed by April 1st in order to be eligible for consideration.

Award Committee

Bryant Sculos (Chair) University of Texas Rio-Grande Valley bryant.sculos@utrgv.edu
Kevin Funk Columbia University kevin.funk@gmail.com
Brian Waddell University of Connecticut
brian.waddell@uconn.edu
Stan Luger University of Northern Colorado
stan.luger@unco.edu