Awards

My first book is entitled “Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg,” and is under contract with Princeton University Press.

In 2022, an article from this broader project was published in Theory and Society, and was awarded an honorable mention for the Charles Tilly Best Article Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Comparative Historical Sociology. The citation for this award read as follows:

“This article takes up a deceptively simple question: why do some cities do better than others in providing the public goods on which nonelite residents depend? To answer it, Bradlow proposes a clear and elegant conceptual typology of cities based on the influence of civil society agents on the state and the state’s ability to coordinate actors and practices beyond its immediate authority. Committee members characterized the article as a “powerful example of what we can learn from translating macro-level theories to the local level” and as “an account of urban inequality that is both critical and refreshingly down to earth.”  Grounded in impressive fieldwork, the article also offers a compelling model for how to do theory in a way that is practically useful and solution-oriented.”

In 2021, an earlier version of my book manuscript — also known as “my doctoral dissertation” — received three honors, including the best dissertation award from two sections of the American Sociological Association and an honorable mention for the best dissertation in the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Below are the citations from the sections in the ASA (LASA’s Brazil section does not provide citations for its awards):

“The committee were particularly impressed by your development of careful cross-case comparisons and process tracing to ask big theoretical questions, by the historical texture and clarity of your account, and by the new path you open towards a truly global urban sociology.”
— Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award, ASA Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology

“Bradlow’s dissertation is intellectually stimulating and contributes to various different discussions in the literature by moving forward the study of social movements, development, and democracy. It is also politically important in its overall analysis of how social movements can impact institutional arrangements to reduce social inequalities. The committee was impressed with the data and the comparative case study design across three public goods. This is a timely project given current importance of finding ways to actually deepen democracy, not just transition from autocratic regimes to formal political democracy or defend existing liberal democracy from the Right in rearguard battles. There are exciting contributions here on social movements, embeddedness, and state capacity and cohesion.”
— Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Dissertation Award, ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements