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Recent work

Publications

Tollefson, J., Frickel, S., and Gore, C., and Helgeson, J. 2025. “Community resilience planning: What new methods reveal about the formation and transformation of a field.” WIREs Climate Change 16(4): e70015.

Candipan, J. and Tollefson, J..2024. “Machine learning and large-scale data for understanding urban inequality.” The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, edited by C. Borch and J.P. Pardo-Guerra. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Tollefson, J., Frickel, S., Gonsalves, S., and Marlow, T. 2023. “Parks, people and pollution: A relational study of socioenvironmental succession.” City & Community (special issue: Environmentalizing Urban Sociology) 22(4): 286–307.

Tollefson, J., Frickel, S., Gonsalves, S., Marlow, T., Sucsy, R., Byrns, M., and Orpen-Tuz, M. 2023. “Early childcare and education in a post-industrial landscape: Inequalities in exposure to active and relic manufacturing in metropolitan Providence, Rhode Island.” Environmental Justice 16(4): 309-320.

Frickel, S. and Tollefson, J. 2022. “When environmental inequality racialized: Historical evidence from Providence, Rhode Island.” Socius 8:1-14.

Tollefson, J., Frickel, S. and Restrepo, MI. 2021. “Feature extraction and machine learning techniques for identifying historic urban environmental hazards.” PLoS ONE 16(8): e0255507.

  • Finalist, 2022 John Odland Award, American Association of Geographers, Spatial Analysis and Modeling Group

Tollefson, J. and Panikkar, B. 2020. “Impact assessment, public engagement, and environmental knowledge production: Large mine permitting in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.” Journal of Political Ecology 27(1): 1166-1188.

  • 2021 Graduate Student Paper Award, Rural Sociological Society, Natural Resources RIG

Tollefson, J. 2020. “Post-Fukushima discourse in the US press: Quantified knowledge, the technical object, and a panicked public.” Public Understanding of Science 29(7): 670-687.

Panikkar, B. and Tollefson, J. 2018. “Land as material, knowledge and relationships: Resource extraction and subsistence imaginaries in Bristol Bay, Alaska.” Social Studies of Science 48(5): 715-739.

Under review and submitted

Tollefson, J. “The Racialization of Environmental Inequality in US Cities, 1880-1930.” R+R.

  • 2023 IPUMS USA Student Research Award
  • 2024 Brent K. Marshall Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Environment and Technology Division
  • 2024 Graduate Student Paper Prize, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, Brown University
  • Honorable mention, 2024 Candace Rogers Award, Eastern Sociological Society
  • Honorable mention, 2024 Graduate Student Paper Award, Environmental Sociology Section of the ASA
  • Featured in IBES spotlight article

Tollefson, J., Frickel, S., Helgeson, J., and Gore, C. “Adapting to adaptation: Conceptual development and field formation in community resilience planning.” R+R.

Demortain, D., Frickel, S., Beck, S., Gray, I., Grundmann, R., Hannud Abdo, A., Kinniburgh, F., Kitson, D., Matzner, N., Rea, C., Tollefson, J., and Wetts, R. “Computational science and technology studies? Assembling STS theory-methods packages with computation.” R+R.

Manuscripts

Tollefson, J. “The environmental dimensions of HOLC redlining decisions.” Working paper.

Tollefson, J. “Industrial geography and urban inequality formation in the early 20th century.” Working paper.

Frickel, S., Demortain, D., Beck, S., Gray, I., Grundmann, R., Hannud Abdo, A., Kinniburgh, F., Kitson, D., Matzner, N., Rea, C., Tollefson, J., and Wetts, R. Environmental knowledge and politics. In progress.

Tollefson, J. “Suburban development and agricultural land conversion: New landscapes of environmental health inequality.” In progress. Delivered at Pacific Sociological Association (Sacramento, CA. Apr. 7-9, 2022).

Public scholarship

Tollefson, J. 2023. “Redlining and segregation in Providence, RI.”" Essay for Mapping Inequality. Richmond, VA: University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab.

Tollefson, J. and Frickel, S. 2021. “Gasworks, lost and found.” Urban Omnibus. New York: Architectural League of New York. July 1.

Tollefson, J. and Urso, M. 2018. “Black Lives Matter at St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” Op-ed in the Providence Journal. April 2.