I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES) at UCSC. I was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during the 2022-2023 year. My work combines historical sociology, critical social theory, and urban political economy and ecology to analyze contemporary urban and environmental culture and politics. I have published widely in leading sociology, geography, and urban studies journals, and my first book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens, was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. I am currently writing a book on the American West’s 610 million acres of public lands, which are key sites of climate transitions and flashpoints of 21st-century political conflict. Before completing my PhD, 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 Dissent: “A new vision for public lands.” I make a case for the contemporary significance of public lands as ‘fixes’ for a variety of 21st century problems; describe similarities in Democratic and Republican administrations’ commodification of, and extractive orientation toward, public lands across very different energy and conservation agendas; and argue that a progressive vision is needed that more substantively departs from public lands’ historic status as a resource deployed by the state in support of private development. I'm particularly pleased that it gets to appear in an issue about Mamdani's New York, since urban-rural coalition building is one of the larger intellectual and political agendas.
New in City: “Climate change and urban-agrarian solidarities,” with Kian Goh and Kasia Paprocki, which continues efforts to examine climate change across urban and rural space, and to create conversation across urban and agrarian studies. The issue includes responses from scholars in both fields.
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)
2024. (with Max Besbris and John Robinson) “A Sociology of Real Estate: Polanyi, Du Bois, and the Relational Study of Commodified Land in a Climate-Changed Future.” Annual Review of Sociology.
2024. (with Miriam Greenberg, Elena Losada, and Chris Wilmers) “Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More information about the larger project available here.
2024. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi) “The Moral Work of Participation: Disillusio, Expertise, and Urban Planning Under Neoliberalism.” Qualitative Sociology.