AWARDS & PRAISE
Buy Here

  • Winner. 2018. SSSP C. Wright Mills Award.
  • Winner. 2020 Pacific Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarship Award.
  • Honorable Mention. 2019. ASA Race, Gender, and Class Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award.
  • Finalist. 2020. ASA Sociology of Education Bourdieu Best Book Award.
  • Selected for Author Meets Critics. American Sociological Association (2019) & The American Society of Criminology (2018).
  • Reviewed in American Journal of Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Journal of Family Theory & Review, Children's Geographies, Anthropology & Education Quarterly.
"A rich, vivid ethnographic account of the barriers young people from a low-income community face; excellent for teaching. Highly recommended."—Annette Lareau, author of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

"This ethnography of the cruel illusion of upward mobility in the context of growing social inequality in America follows marginalized black and Latino youth who are 'playing by the rules.' They avoid drugs, gangs, and teenage parenthood and even apply to college, only to find themselves putting in 'mad hours' at underpaid, insecure, dead-end service sector jobs, scrambling to survive. The contemporary lie of the American dream comes alive in the everyday struggles and splintering hopes of the youths before they even have a chance to transition into adulthood."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and coauthor of Righteous Dopefiend

"In a sobering and heart-wrenching account, Ranita Ray brilliantly captures the uncertainty and disappointment that prevail in the lives of marginal minority young people. Despite having high ambitions and work ethic – despite internalizing the individualist American success narrative – they suffer dearly and misrecognize the structural barriers that block their upward mobility. Ray masterfully documents their trials and tribulations through weaving family dynamics, school conditions, menial labor, romance, hunger – and more. This powerful book is a must read for anyone wanting an update on the state of young people stuck in the deep mud that is the American class system."—Randol Contreras, author of The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream

"Ray uses . . . details to reveal how deeply life is colored by poverty and how desperately these young people want to believe they can succeed."--American Journal of Sociology

"Ray provides a refreshing analysis of the challenges facing economically marginalized youth of color. . . . The Making of a Teenage Service Class has significant implications for family scholars, practitioners, and educators. It reminds family scholars and practitioners to pay attention to the intricacy of family dynamics and the importance of not assuming that everyone in a family shares the same experiences, has the same needs or interests, or responds the same way in the face of poverty."--Journal of Family Theory and Review

"Ray's engaging ethnography, filled with full-figured characters wearing colorful nail polish, inspires us to imagine a more just world where dreams are not just ideologically encouraged but structurally supported"--Contemporary Sociology

PRAISE

As the Leaves Turn Gold offers a nuanced, fine-grained and engrossing analysis of Asian American experiences of aging. This is an important volume that provides many critical insights into the dynamics of aging, immigration, and social inequality. — Nazli Kibria, Boston University

A very timely book! Drawing upon an intersectional analysis and cumulative disadvantage over the life course, the authors of this volume provide important sociological insights on the complexity of Asian American experiences of aging. Anchor stories, interviews and translated accounts combined with careful analysis lend to a nuanced and truly deep understanding of the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that shape contemporary aging experience of Asian Americans. — Margaret Abraham, Hofstra University

This path breaking research examines and documents the issues aging Asian Americans across cultures face in the contemporary globalizing context of U.S. society. It provides much needed analysis regarding shifting notions of 'family' and 'care' traversing multiple generations, and compels us to pay close attention to how elderly immigrant populations negotiate access and citizenship, and reconfigure kin and social networks. An outstanding contribution to the fields of Asian American, and American studies! — Elora Halim Chowdhury, University of Massachusetts Boston

This powerful and empirically rich study of aging in the Asian American context breaks new ground in a neglected domain of research. It's most valuable contribution is the integration of intersectional and transnational frameworks to provide a contextualized, historically grounded and comprehensive analysis of Asian American experiences of aging. — Anjana Narayan, California State Polytechnic University

Purkayastha and her coauthors turn much-needed attention to the United States' growing population of elderly Asian Americans. In this book, they give voice to the diversity of this group of people, exploring how ethnic background, class, gender, migration status, and other factors affect the experiences, perspectives and needs of its various members. In doing so, they shed light on stories that are both uniquely Asian and quintessentially American. — Khyati Joshi, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Email: ranitaray@unm.edu 
Twitter: @ranitaray1