Ruth Horowitz is currently Professor of Sociology at New York University and is working on a new project on medical organizations, participatory democracy and, on the micro level, patient-centered care. She has served as graduate director, undergraduate director, acting chair and is currently honors director. Before moving to NYU in 1997, she was Professor at the University of Delaware. She is also chair of the publications committee of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the journal Symbolic Interaction.

She is the author of several ethnographies: Honor and the American Dream, Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community (Rutgers University Press,1983) for which she received honorable mention for the C. Wright Mills Award, Teen Mothers, Citizens or Dependents? (University of Chicago Press, 1995) for which she received the Charles Horton Cooley Award, and In the Public Interest: Medical Licensing and the  Disciplinary Process (Rutgers Press 2013) for which she received the Distinguished Book Award given by the law section of the  American Sociological Association. She is interested in issues of participation in democracies – how marginalized groups participate, how welfare workers define the ways teenage mothers should participate, and how experts and “non-experts” can deliberate together.

Professional webpage: http://sociology.as.nyu.edu/object/ruthhorowitz.html