The APSA Committee on the Status of Latinos y Latinas in the Profession is now accepting nominations for the Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell Mentoring Award. Named in honor of the first Latina to earn a PhD in political science, Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell, this award recognizes exceptional mentoring of Latino/a students and junior faculty each year with three awards. The awards are given in the areas of undergraduate, graduate, and junior faculty mentoring.
Mentoring of Undergraduates: Jesse Acevedo, University of Denver
Jesse Acevedo is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016 and is a past recipient of the APSA Fund for Latino Scholarship. His research focuses on political economy, democratization, and international migration, with a particular interest in the political economy of emigration and remittances in developing countries. His current research examines the political consequences of emigration and remittances on political attitudes and behaviors in Central America.
Mentoring of Undergraduates: Ricardo Ramirez, University of Notre Dame
Ricardo Ramirez is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the director of the Hesburgh Program in Public Service. He is past President of the Western Political Science Association. He received his B.A., cum laude, from UCLA and his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. His research focuses on the effects of political context on participation, the political mobilization of minority populations, and the causes and consequences of increasing diversity among elected officials.
Mentoring of Graduate Students: Andrea Silva, University of North Texas
Andrea Silva is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. She studies race and ethnic politics and Latino and immigration politics in the U.S. Dr. Silva’s research focuses on how institutions shape political participation among marginalized groups, particularly immigrants and people of color. Her work investigates the dynamics of state level immigration policy and their impact on immigrant and minority communities on topics such as licensing, education, and, most recently, food insecurity. Her forthcoming book investigates how direct democracy mechanisms influence state immigration policies, arguing for their significant role in shaping legislative outcomes and state-level political behaviors.
Mentoring of Latino/a Junior Faculty: Inés Valdez, Johns Hopkins University
Inés Valdez is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research is on the tradition of Latinx and Latin American Political Thought, the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, and on Kant and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism. Thematically, she works on transnationalism, capitalism, ecology, migration, and empire. Her award-winning work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Kantian Review, and Perspectives on Politics, among other outlets. Her last book, Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press and received an honourable mention from the Sussex International Theory Prize. The book relies on the Black radical tradition to analyze the imperial roots of popular sovereignty and self-determination—i.e., its reliance on the extraction of labor of racialized others and their land. The book theorizes Latinx families as both central for the sustenance of privileged subjects and decimated by this role. Moreover, Valdez argues that we ought to understand the devaluation of manual labore and nature as twin processes secured by ideologies of technoracism. The book proposes an anti-imperial ecological popular sovereignty to oppose these structures of domination.
Mentoring of Latino/a Junior Faculty: Tony Carey, University of Pittsburgh
Tony E. Carey Jr. is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. Before joining the faculty at Pitt, he was an associate professor of political science at the University of North Texas, where he was the cofounder of UNT’s Center for Racial and Ethnic Equity in Health and Society (CREEHS). Carey specializes in the areas of public opinion and political behavior, with primary interests in African American politics, racial and ethnic politics, gender politics and political psychology. Currently, he is working on several projects exploring the psychological, social, and political consequences of citizens’ interactions with police forces. His work has been published in several journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. Currently, he is serving as the co-lead editor of Politics, Groups, and Identities.