Professor Jooyoung Lee's book, Blowin' Up: Rap Dreams in South Central, recently received the 2018 Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI). According to SSSI's website, this award is given annually to an author for a book that represents an important contribution to the perspective of symbolic interaction.
Jooyoung Lee is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central, is a long-term ethnographic study of young Black men growing up in the shadows of gang violence and the glittering entertainment industries in Los Angeles. This book shows how hip hop culture shields young men from the dangers of gang violence. It also reveals the larger structural forces that inspire “existential urgency” during the transition to adulthood. His current research looks at gun violence in Philadelphia and Toronto.
More information on Professor Lee's award winning book can be found here from the University of Chicago Press.