SWS 2025 Award Winners

We are proud to introduce you to the winners of SWS's 2025 awards. The winners will be honored during the 2026 Winter Meeting in San Diego. We also want to thank the committees for their hard work in selecting award recipients. 

 Darci K. Schmidgall is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. Her research centers around reproductive justice and the criminalization of abortion, drawing from the sociology of religion, political and social movement sociology, and insights from both criminology and the sociology of deviance. Her most recent article, published in Social Problems is titled "Anti-Abortion and Pro-Coercion: White Christian Nationalism and Support for Arresting Women Who Have Abortions" is available online via Open Access. Darci has taught sociology and criminology at many colleges and universities in both Illinois and Oklahoma and is especially passionate about building a classroom space where students from a considerable array of backgrounds can experience, recognize, and co-create justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion as part of the learning process. A co-parent to five beautiful children with her incredible partner, Darci plans on completing her dissertation in May 2026 and hopes to land a tenure-track assistant professor position in sociology or criminology to begin the following fall.

Chow Green Dissertation Scholarship Award Recipient

Carolina Hernandez

Carolina Hernandez (she/her) is a Chicana PhD Candidate in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She studies Latinx racial construction, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) social justice movements, and intersectional resistance to white supremacy and colonialism. Her research is firmly rooted in the migration narratives, labor struggles, and resistance of the Southwest, particularly Arizona. As both a writer and researcher, she hopes to account for the localized ways in which collective identity, counter-hegemonic ideologies, and liberational movement practices are constructed and maintained at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

Chow Green Dissertation Scholarship Honorable Mention Award Recipient

Kritika Pandey

Kritika Pandey (she/her) is an anti-caste decolonial feminist sociologist whose research is located at the intersections of mobilizations and labor rights discourse(s), care work, migration trajectories, globalization, racialized, caste-embedded and gendered labor processes as well as collective resistance against multi-layered inequalities. Kritika holds an M.Phil. and a B.Sc. (hons) degree in Anthropology from Delhi University, Delhi, India.

Kritika's dissertation examines how women’s worker movements in precarious labor sectors negotiate between global conversations on standardization of labor rights and everyday issues of informality in their work conditions. Combining transnational feminist ethnography, interviews and archival data, she investigates collective action for worker rights across two different national contexts (India and the US). She hopes to contribute to scholarship on economic sociology, labor movements and transnational sociology by addressing gaps between local and global discourses on worker rights and discussing tensions around professionalization and legal recognition in sectors like paid domestic work.