Armando Lara-Millan

Associate Professor

Office
482 Social Sciences Building

Curriculum Vitae
Curriculum Vitae230.06 KB


Research Interests
Historical Sociology, Ethnography, Economic Sociology, Knowledge, Medicine, Law and Society



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.
Representative Publications
BOOK
Lara-Millán, Armando. 2021. Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity. Oxford University Press.
Winner of Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, American Sociological Association, 2022
Co-Winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, SREM Section of the American Sociological Association, 2022
Winner of the Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award, Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, 2022
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KNOWLEDGE, CRISIS, AND THE STATE
Lara-Millán, Armando. 2022. "The Administrative Disappearing of State Crisis: The Resolution of Prison Realignment in Los Angeles County." American Journal of Sociology, 127(5): 1460-1506.
Lara-Millán, Armando. 2017.?“States as a Series of People Exchanges.” In Kimberly Morgan and Ann Orloff (Eds.), The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lara-Millán, Armando. 2021.?“Theorizing Financial Extraction: The Curious Case of Telephone Profits in the Los Angeles County Jails.” Punishment & Society, 23(1): 107-126.
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ORGANIZATIONS, SCARCITY, AND KNOWLEDGE
Lara-Millán, Armando and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. 2017.?“The Interorganizational Utility of Welfare Stigma in the Criminal Justice System.” Criminology 55(1): 59-84.
Winner of the Distinguished Article Prize, Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, 2017
Winner of the Winner of the Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award, Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the ASA, 2013.
Lara-Millán, Armando. 2014.?“Public Emergency Room Overcrowding in the Era of Mass Imprisonment.” American Sociological Review 79(5): 866-887.
Winner of the Stinchcombe Prize in Organization Studies at SION, 2012
Honorable Mention for Best Graduate Student, SSSP’s Health, Health Policy, and Health Services Division, 2012
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METHODS: ARCHIVES, ETHNOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND THEORY
"Appendix" to Redistributing the Poor. 2021.
Lara-Millán, Armando, Sunmin Kim, Brian Sargent. 2020.?“Theorizing with Archives: Contingency, Mistakes, and Plausible Alternatives.” Qualitative Sociology, 43: 345-365.?
Lara-Millan, Armando. 2019. “We Just Have to do Something - Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018).?European Journal of Sociology,?60(3), 459-462
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IN PROGRESS
Lara-Millán, Armando and Melissa Guzman-Garcia. "Digital Platforms, Policing, and Gentrification: The Transformation of Disparate Events into Crime Waves and “Failed Crime” into Real Crime." Revise and Resubmit at Social Problems.
Lara-Millán, Armando. “American Healthcare Spending: Power, Language, and the Pricing of Advanced Medical Technology.” In preparation.
Lara-Millán, Armando, Meghna Mukherjee, Margaret Eby, Skyler Wang, Maya Earle. "Between Promise and Reality: How Experts and Consumers Leverage Uncertainty in Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Health Testing."?Forthcoming at PLOS ONE.
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