Naa Oyo Kwate to Receive the 2024 Best Book Award in the Field of Urban Affairs
February 15, 2024
Naa Oyo Kwate, associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology, has been selected to receive the Urban Affairs Association’s (UAA) 2024 Best Book in the Field of Urban Affairs Award for White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation. It was among 64 books based on rigorous research on an urban issue within any national context that were nominated this year for the UAA award. Kwate also won the 2023 Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.
An interdisciplinary social scientist with wide ranging interests in racial inequality and Black urban life, Kwate will receive the UAA award on April 24 at the International Conference on Urban Affairs in New York. This year’s conference, “Cities on the Edge: Promoting Equity and Resiliency through Research, Activism, Planning and Policy,” will convene more than 1,200 participants from over 55 countries.
Originally trained as a clinical psychologist, a startling burden of chronic illness among the patients she treated in large New York City hospitals led her to a research program investigating the social determinants of African American health. With the support of more than $2.7 million in federal and foundation funding, Kwate has led interdisciplinary research studies at the intersection of social science, public health and the humanities.