University of Georgia education professor Jerome E. Morris has been named the recipient of a national award for an article he wrote that focuses on researching families affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Morris, a professor in the College of Education’s department of workforce education, leadership, and social foundations and a Research Fellow in UGA’s Institute for Behavioral Research, will receive the Feldman Award from the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family during the group’s annual conference, March 14-18 in New Orleans. The Feldman Award comes with a $1,000 cash prize.
Morris received the award for an article titled, “Out of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Researching the Katrina Diaspora,” which was published in a July 2008 issue of the journal, Urban Education.
The award, in honor of Harold and Margaret Feldman, both early leaders in the fields of family and policy, is given to an author or authors of a peer-reviewed journal article or book chapter published within the last five years that makes a significant social policy contribution to understanding ethnicity and/or gender.
As a social scientist, Morris’ scholarship is grounded in the fields of sociology, anthropology, school reform, and urban studies, and he is particularly interested in social and educational inequality, and the consequences for schools, communities, families and youth. He has lead empirical studies of public school desegregation policy in major cities such as Atlanta, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and conducted longitudinal investigations of issues of identity, social class, and achievement in middle class and predominantly black suburban contexts in Metropolitan Atlanta. Morris received a 2010 UGA Creative Research Medal for the national impact and visibility of his research accomplishments.
Morris, who also is an affiliate faculty member in the Institute for African American Studies at UGA, was recently invited to participate in the Ford Foundation’s Secondary Education and Racial Justice Collaborative, a national project focused on advancing racial justice and moving a progressive secondary education agenda forward.
In 2009, Morris received the college’s Russell Yeany Research Award and was among three people from UGA named to the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education’s inaugural class of Education Policy Fellowship Program in 2008. He is the author of the book, Troubling the Waters: Fulfilling the Promise of Quality Public Schooling for Black Children, published in 2009 by Teachers College Press.
Morris joined the UGA faculty in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in education and human development from Vanderbilt University.
For the full text of “Out of New Orleans,” see http://uex.sagepub.com/content/43/4/463.abstract.
For more information on the College of Education, see http://www.coe.uga.edu/.
For more information on the Institute for Behavioral Research, see http://www.ibr.uga.edu/.
