1 bio
I’m a PhD candidate at the Brown University Department of Sociology. My research investigates inequality and stratification as environmental processes with a focus on long-term trajectories of social and environmental change in cities. I also have an enduring interest in political ecology and science and technology studies. Check out my work using the links below. Thanks for visiting!
My research examines the environmental dimensions of core sociological questions. I investigate inequality and social stratification as environmental processes and seek to understand how society-environment interactions shape the emergence and continuation of social, political, and spatial forms of inequality over time.
My dissertation responds to a historical gap in the environmental and urban sociology literatures to provide the first analysis of urban environmental inequality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, corresponding to the initial formation of neighborhood-scale racial segregation. This research is enabled by historical social-environmental data extraction techniques using a variety of computational methods (see this article on machine learning approaches to data extraction, as well as the Socio-ecological City Project). In a case study of the Providence, RI, area, I find that environmental inequality shifted from a class-based phenomenon to one structured primarily by race and ethnicity, as residential segregation began to solidify at the neighborhood level at the turn of the 20th century (see this article). My dissertation extends this research to a comparative sample of US cities, seeking to understand the impact of late-19th century industrial siting on long-term trajectories of urban inequality. Related strands of my research investigate complex interactions in the spatial dynamics of environmental privilege and risk over time, with a focus post-industrial and contemporary patterns of urban inequality (see this article and this article).
I also have experience in field interviews and mixed qualitative analysis. I conducted semi-structured interviews in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and rural villages in Alaska, and integrated these interview data with planning reports, court cases, and gray literature as part of two articles (article 1, article 2) on contested environmental knowledge production and anti-extraction movements. As part of a separate project, I drew on qualitative coding techniques to understand US media coverage of the sociotechnical controversies surrounding the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan (see this article).
I use a variety of tools in my research, including:
+ Machine learning approaches to data extraction
+ Data scraping and automation in Python
+ Computational text analysis in Python and R
+ Spatial analysis in R, ArcGIS, and QGIS
+ Qualitative analysis in NVivo and HyperResearch
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