Biography

Asia Friedman, Ph.D., is an associate professor and associate chair of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She is a co-editor of the Sociological Forum, a peer-reviewed quarterly journal. 

Friedman is a cultural sociologist with a primary research focus on the cognitive and sensory underpinnings of the social construction process. She has explored these underpinnings in the areas of gender, race, the body, medicine, and sociological theory.

Her first book, Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (Chicago, 2013), was awarded the 2016 Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association. A second monograph, Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes, was published in 2023 by Rutgers University Press. A third co-edited volume, Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Materiality, was published in 2023 by Bristol University Press. 

Her articles have appeared in various sociological journals including Sociological Quarterly, Cultural Sociology, Symbolic Interaction, and Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She was recently elected Chair of the Section on the Body and Embodiment of the American Sociological Association after serving for three years as a council member and the co-chair of the section's communication committee. She regularly sits on ASA section award committees and has also participated in the Body and Embodiment and Culture sections' mentoring programs. She served as a grant review panelist for NSF ADVANCE in 2016 and was a co-investigator of the social science research project component of the University of Delaware's ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant. ​​

Friedman researches how individuals make mental distinctions in contexts of ambiguity and complexity. She also examines how sensory perception works to support cultural distinctions as a mechanism to simplify and resolve competing meanings. Through this work, she aims to advance thinking on what it means to claim that something is "socially constructed," particularly a material entity such as the human body.

Although Friedman's approach is rooted in cultural and cognitive sociology and sensory studies, the questions about the social construction process that most interest her have applicability to a wide range of other substantive topics, allowing her to engage in debates in the sociology of gender, the sociology of the body, the sociology of race, medical sociology, and sociological theory. In each case, she uses an analysis of social patterns of thought and sensory perception to bring productive new questions to ongoing conversations in the field.