Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2013. Before joining the Department of Sociology, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Armando is fascinated by how powerful organizations, whose actions affect the life fortunes of large numbers of people, use language to reshape critical material resources; that is, he examines how these organizations use culture and cognitive processes to recast the economic worth of resources that many people depend on, purchase, or are subject too (e.g. jail and hospital space, crime, advanced medical technology, or even property value). He has examined such processes in the context of urban poverty governance within large American urban jails and public hospitals, and is now turning his attention to the gigantic American healthcare system, digital crime platforms, and venture capital firms.
His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Criminology, and among others, the American Journal of Sociology. His book “Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity” was published with Oxford University Press in 2021 and was the winner of the 2022 Distinguish Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association, the 2022 Eliot Friedson Outstanding Publication Award from the Medical Sociology Section of the ASA, and the 2022 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the SREM section of the ASA. Armando is also the recipient of awards from the National Science Foundation, Law and Society Association, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the Ford Foundation, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Contact: armando@berkeley.edu.