I am an urban and environmental sociologist, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of UCSC’s new Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES). I was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during the 2022-2023 year. I study understandings of the environment and their relationship to large-scale spatial and social transformations, through historical and contemporary research on urban greening, sustainability planning and policy, infrastructure, and climate change. My work bridges political economic and cultural approaches to urban and environmental studies and is particularly attuned to the politics of the built environment: how natural and human-made environments mediate experience to produce particular understandings of society.
I am currently at work on several projects: on infrastructure and sociology, the rise and politics of urban sustainability planning, and public lands and the energy transition.
I received my PhD in Sociology from New York University and a BA from Vassar College. Before graduate school, I worked for five years with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, primarily on issues of participatory design, immigration, and public space use.
News
New in the Annual Review of Sociology: “A Sociology of Real Estate: Polanyi, Du Bois, and the Relational Study of Commodified Land in a Climate-Changed Future,” with Max Besbris and John Robinson.
New special issue on “Environmentalizing Urban Sociology” with Miriam Greenberg now out in City and Community, with our open-access introduction available here. We discuss it on ASA podcasts here.
My Harper’s Jan 2023 cover story “Boomtown: A solar land rush in the West” examines—and questions—the use of public lands for renewable energy development. It also previews some of the themes of my current book project, which treats public lands as a key site to ask and answer questions about climate crisis, social crisis, and paths of social change in the 21st century. You can hear me discuss the article and these topics on Think with Krys Boyd and on Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin.
Other recent publications (please contact me for PDFs of any published work)
media coverage: UCSC, CapRadio, KQED, Grist/High Country News, The New York Times