Rate My Professor Amy Best

Amy L. Best is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, where she also serves as the director of the Center for Social Science Research. Her research focuses primarily on the study of social inequalities, with specific interest in how gender, race and class differently shape the social experiences of contemporary American youth. She has published widely on unequal schooling, youth and childhood well-being, marketization, as well as community-based health disparities and food insecurity, drawing heavily on cultural and interpretive perspectives in sociology. Best has been awarded grants from National Science Foundation, Corporation for National Community Service, and U.S Department of Education. She is author of Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture (2000 Routledge), which was selected for the 2002 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award, Fast Cars: Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars (NYU Press 2006), and editor of Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies (NYU Press, 2007). Her most recent book is Fast Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines and Social Ties (NYU Press, 2017), which was selected for a 2018 Morris Rosenberg Award by the DC Sociological Society.

Best’s expertise is in qualitative and community-based approaches to social science research. She has partnered with community-based non-profits and local government agencies in different research capacities. She has conducted program evaluation on farm-to-school and food education programs operating in public schools, as well as community-based interventions to address diet-related community health disparities, including mobile food markets and food voucher programs serving historically-marginalized communities in Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia. She is co-director of the Youth Research Council (YRC), a youth participatory action research program to improve equity in school. The YRC is a partnership of George Mason University’s Early Identification Program (EIP) and the Center for Social Science Research, in collaboration with local area school stakeholders. She is co-PI for the research evaluation of the Fairfax County Economic Mobility Pilot, a guaranteed income program. Best is the 2025-2026 President of the Eastern Sociology Society. She also currently serves on the American Sociological Association Executive Council.