The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice congratulates Ph.D. candidate Guyu Sun on earning third place in the 2025 Gene Carte Student Paper Competition, organized by the American Society of Criminology. Her paper, “Contextualizing Stigma: How Cultural and Structural Contexts Influence Interpersonal Exclusion Following Criminal Justice Contact" was recognized for its clear argument and strong contribution to criminology.

The ASC Gene Carte Student Paper Award, established in 1971, is presented annually to recognize outstanding scholarly work by students. Recipients receive a monetary prize.

Guyu Sun is a current Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Her research examines inequalities in punishment and their collateral consequences, with a particular focus on the experiences of children and adolescents and the roles of peers, parents, teachers, and school contexts.

Her paper uses longitudinal school-based friendship data and social network analysis. She found that adolescents with police contact often face interpersonal exclusion, but the extent of this exclusion depends on the cultural and structural contexts of their grade cohort networks. Cohort networks with different levels of deviance popularity (the popularity of delinquent students) and network closure (the interconnectedness of students) exhibit varying degrees of interpersonal exclusion.

Guyu explained that this paper grew out of her master’s thesis. She described the process of developing it as intellectually challenging but deeply rewarding. “Having it recognized by the ASC felt like a validation of the need to study stigma tied to criminal justice contact and labeling theory in more nuanced ways, and it motivates me to continue this line of research,” she said.