Directors
Dr. Matthew Jerome Schneider (he/him) [@socistmjs] is an incoming assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work is situated in the areas of race and racism, environmental sociology, community and civic engagement, and homelessness. A simple but central narrative in his academic work is that justice, antiracism, and even community service are easier said than done. His current book project, Serving the Street, for example, explores how homeless service volunteers in St. Louis, Missouri both undermine and reproduce problems related to homelessness. His other recent projects consider how local stakeholders interpret and respond to various environmental issues. For example, in one line of research, he examines American support for expansion of renewable energy production (e.g., wind and solar) and for a “just transition.” Specifically, by exploring the emerging offshore wind industry, this project attempts to better tease out the tension between just transition discourse and an ongoing history of extractive logics. In a second line of research, he is collaborating with Winyah Rivers Alliance, a riverkeeper organization in Coastal Carolina, to better understand local environmental activism and volunteering during a time in which publics are increasingly aware of the pressing climate crisis, environmental injustices, and threats to public health. Schneider’s recent work has appeared in Qualitative Sociology, Human Geography, and Sociological Quarterly. Find Schneider’s collected works here or visit his website.
Dr. Brian F. O’Neill (he/him) [@socioneill] is sociologist and postdoctoral research scholar in the College of Global Futures and the School of Ocean Futures at Arizona State University. His research often draws from engagements with the intellectual traditions of environmental sociology, political ecology, and political economy. The underlying question motivating much of his empirical work is: what is the nature of the recent, intense interest in “green” practices invoked by climate adaptation strategies? In problematizing existing adaptation efforts, he has explored issues of environmental injustices, public opinion, and social inequalities in policymaking at the nexus of the water and energy sectors (e.g., rivers and dams, desalination, fisheries, wind, and natural gas), using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Most recently, his work has focused on the intersections of climate and ocean policies as they illuminate significant trends in the future of labor, political economy, and competing conceptions of sustainability. Brian’s activities are indicative of his commitment to scholarship that requires engagement across diverse publics, that is, with the academic community, but also those in power to make decisions about our future, and those who may not (yet) have a seat at the table. His research has been published in various venues, including Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, The Sociological Quarterly, Human Geography, Visual Studies, the Journal of World-systems Research and more. Find O’Neill’s collected works here or visit his website.
Collaborators
Dr. Valeria Bonatti (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer of Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research areas include globalization, the environment, global health, migration and gender. Her current research projects consider the role of displaced persons - migrants, refugees, asylum seekers - in making green economic growth possible, in Europe, in Southeast Asia and in the US Midwest. This work includes her in-progress book Green-Glass Ceilings: Neapolitan Women and The Politics of Waste, and journal articles in International Labor and Working Class History, Migration Studies, the European Journal of Women’s Studies and in Capitalism, Nature Socialism.
Her collaborative work on the migration-development nexus and on transnational families has been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, in the co-authored book Transnational Families of Italian Emigrants (edited by Celid, 2019) and in the Migrantes Foundation’s 2017 Report on Italians in the World (Rapporto Italiani Nel Mondo). Find Bonatti’s collected works here.
Dr. Anne-Lise Boyer is a geographer and postdoctoral fellow at the International Research Lab Iglobes at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on climate change adaptation, exploring power dynamics, institutions, and governance structures. Based in the Southwestern U.S. since 2015, her research has a particular emphasis on drought and extreme heat events and their impact on water resources. Drawing from a political ecology approach, she examines the socio-ecological tensions and transformations experienced by cities in the context of climate change: what new environments are being created, by whom, and for whom? Within this framework, her recent work focuses on urban stream restoration projects in Arizona's metropolises, exploring the issue of environmental justice and the dynamics of green gentrification associated with the development of green infrastructures. Her research has been published in Water Alternatives, Global Environmental Change, Environmental Communication, and European journals such as Cybergéo. Find Boyer’s collected works here.
Dr. Tim Clark (he/him) [@Timothy_Clark8] is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Sociology at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He teaches multiple classes at the intersection of politics, culture, political economy, and environmental change. His research has explored the association between fishery and agrarian footprints and economic modernization across multiple levels of the global economy. He has also conducted historical case study research on the decline of the Atlantic menhaden fishery and enabling conditions for the ‘Blue Economy’ in the Caribbean. Both these lines of work attempt to incorporate dimensions associated with racial capitalism and dependency theory, or the notion that the global economy incorporates formally decolonized territories in structurally uneven fashion. After many years of reading on and researching “development,” his current interests include theoretically reassessing the roles that financialization, real estate speculation, and other ‘adaptations’ to secular stagnation play in maintaining environmental extraction, domestic inequality, and unequal ecological exchange in both marine and terrestrial environmental contexts. Find Clark’s collected works here.
Fatou Jobe (she/her) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a passion for exploring the intricate intersections of sociology, economics, and environmental studies. Holding a Bachelor's degree in Economics and a Master's degree in African Studies, Jobe’s academic journey has equipped her with a multifaceted understanding of global dynamics and African development. Her research interests span across various fields, including Environmental Sociology, Global and Transnational Sociology, and Economic Sociology. Particularly intrigued by the complexities of international relations, Jobe conducts in-depth research into the realm of China-Africa relations, exploring the economic, social, and environmental implications of this crucial partnership. Her work also delves into specific areas such as aquaculture and fishmeal production, resource extraction and governance, as well as the intersection of gender norms and development. Her research has been published in journals like Feminist Africa. With a commitment to rigorous research and a drive to make meaningful contributions to academia, Fatou Jobe continues to explore and analyze pressing societal issues through her academic pursuits. Find Fatou’s collected works here.
Dr. Elke Kellner (she/her) [@Elke__Kellner] is a Marie-Curie Fellow in the School of Sustainability at the Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the transformation of social-ecological systems towards sustainability. The goal of her work is to understand how complex multi-level trade-offs are governed in multi-actor, multi-interest governance systems. Specifically, she works towards understanding trade-offs between Sustainable Development Goals and the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. She aims to bring knowledge into action by designing research through co-production processes and to inform policies and decision-makers that improve outcomes for people and nature.
In her most recent projects, Kellner has been working on the governance of trade-off situations 1) in protected areas such as National Parks and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and 2) at proposed mines on sacred land from indigenous people for the extraction of minerals for energy transformation. She uses mainly qualitative methods and her background as a human geographer and natural scientist enables her to conduct interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects. As a postdoctoral researcher, she has worked -inter alia- on an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project about the governance of trade-off situations of Water-Energy-Food Nexus cases. In her interdisciplinary PhD in Climate Science, she has studied the governance of trade-off situations between climate change mitigation and adaptation. Find Kellner’s collected works here or visit her website.
Dr. Parthiban Muniandy is a Professor of Sociology at Sarah Lawrence College, specializing in transnational migration and urban cosmopolitanism with a focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. His research and writing are primarily ethnographic, focusing on the largely invisible everyday lives of migrants, refugees, and other undocumented communities. Since joining Sarah Lawrence in 2017, he has made significant contributions to the field, authoring two notable books, Politics of the Temporary and Ghost Lives of the Pendatang. Muniandy earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2015, where he previously served as a Lecturer of Global Studies. His scholarly achievements extend to various peer-reviewed articles in esteemed international and migration studies journals and contributions to the co-authored book Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic. He is a former Faculty Director for the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, a four-college alliance supported by the Mellon Foundation. Find Muniandy’s collected works here.
Dr. Yoshitaka Ota (he/him) has a background in social anthropology at the University College London. He has conducted ethnographic research on various coastal communities, including Palau, UK, Indonesia and Japan, studying the socialization and cultural meanings associated with fishing practices. For the last ten years, he has been engaged in policy research involving coastal indigenous communities, marine spatial planning and human security. As an anthropologist conducting social and cultural research on various coastal communities, he was struck more by our similarities than our differences. One recurring theme he has witnessed across the world is the inequity between who has access to and benefits from oceans and who relies on oceans to live. We know that the human relationship with oceans under modern market systems is unsustainable, unstable and inequitable. We hear that in stories about overfishing and plastic straws and coral reef. What we do not often see are the human stories about the ocean communities that are already facing urgent ecological, social and political problems, even before complex environmental challenges are layered on. We are not in the rooms where scientists and leaders make political and societal decisions to the best of their ability, but without the capacity to not further disadvantage the marginalized and the disempowered. We need to create a new platform for ocean governance to identify the inequities that exist, develop knowledge-based solutions, and actually enact these changes to make oceans equitable for everyone. Thus, his core research interest is to understand how to strengthen social equity in ocean governance while we face global environmental changes. Ota’s unit consists of a team of cross-disciplinary scholars. Find Ota’s collected works here.
Dr. Julie Patarin-Jossec‘s (she/they) [@juliepatarinjossec] research spans the areas of feminist and Indigenous theory, environmental studies, and visual sociology. Through ethnography and art-based methods, she is interested in how colonialism generates politics of bodies and environments––resulting in land access and dispossession, extractivism, degradation, domestication, and exclusion––and the subsequent forms of resistance and agency deployed by human and nonhuman bodies. She investigates these dynamics in the fields of commercial diving (i.e., underwater public work) and aquaculture. A few years ago, Julie started experimenting with filmmaking and photography techniques (including conceptual portraiture, thermal imagery, colour separation and chemical treatment of analog film), which led her to develop original methodologies both within and beyond her academic practice. She has taught in French and Russian universities, is the founder of several visual methodologies working groups (e.g., International Political Science Association’s “Visual Politics” committee), is Co-Editor of Visual Studies, and a Board member of the International Visual Sociology Association. Since 2023, Julie is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Explorers Club. She is especially committed to initiatives fostering inclusiveness, diversity, and research ethics. Among dozens of articles, films and media contributions, she is the author of The Thread of Water: An Essay on Photography, Ethnography, and Feminist Ecologies (Immaterial Books, forthcoming in 2023). Find Patarin-Jossec‘s collected works here or visit their website.