ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY
FIELD STATEMENT READING LIST
November 5, 2015
The field statement is the student’s creation of their assessment of the state of the field. There
will be 2 or 3 in-depth subfields of the field statement, and these should be designed to help
move you towards the dissertation. The field statement will include at least two critical readings
from each area on the reading list: Environmental Health, Social Movements, Political Economy
of the Environment, Environmental Justice, STS and the Environment, and Energy, Food, and
Natural Resources. These will be applied to the overall framework and major themes of the field
statement, not written about as a stand-alone “classics core.” The faculty have created a
Blackboard course that contains all readings from existing graduate courses in environmental
sociology, and students will have access to this to facilitate obtaining readings. Students will
deposit in the Blackboard course all readings not already there, to continue building it.
Environmental Health
Critical Texts
Brown, Phil. 2007. Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Movement. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Edelstein, Michael. 2004. Contaminated Communities: The Social and Psychological Impacts of
Residential Toxic Exposure. Second Edition. Boulder: Westview.
Steingraber, Sandra. 2010. Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer
and the Environment. Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Books.
Additional Reading
Adams, Crystal, Phil Brown, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Julia Green Brody, Ruthann Rudel, Ami
Zota, Sarah Dunagan, Jessica Tovar, and Sharyle Patton. 2011. “Disentangling the Exposure
Experience: The Roles of Community Context and Report-back of Environmental Exposure
Data” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 52 (2):180-196.
Altman Rebecca G., Rachel Morello-Frosch, Julia G. Brody, Ruthann A. Rudel, Phil Brown, and
Mara Averick. 2008. Pollution Comes Home and Gets Personal: Women’s Experience of
Household Chemical Exposure. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 49:417-435.
Baron, Sherry, Raymond Sinclair, Devon Payne-Sturges, Jerry Phelps, Harold Zenick, Gwen W.
Collman, and Liam R. O'Fallon 2009. “Partnerships for Environmental and Occupational
Justice.” American Journal of Public Health. 99 (S3): S517-S525.
Colborn, Theo, Diane Dumanoski, and John Peterson Meyers. 1996. Our Stolen Future: Are We
Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?--A Scientific Detective Story. New York,
NY: Dutton/Penguin USA.
Downey, Liam. 2006. Environmental Racial Inequality in Detroit. Social Forces. 85: 771-796.
Erikson, Kai. 1976. Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek
Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Klawiter, Maren. 1999. “Racing for the Cure, Walking Women, and Toxic Touring: Mapping
Cultures of Action within the Bay Area Terrain of Breast Cancer.” Social Problems. 46:104-126.
Kriebel, David, Joel Tickner, Paul Epstein, John Lemons, Richard Levins, Edward Loechler,
Margaret Quinn, Ruthann Rudell, Ted Schettler, and Michael Stoto. 2001. “The Precautionary
Principle in Environmental Science.” Environmental Health Perspectives. 109 (9): 871-876.
Langston, Nancy. 2010. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Little, Peter. C. 2014. Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks. New York, NY: New
York University Press.
Markowitz Gerald and Rosner, David. 2002. Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of
Industrial Pollution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
McCormick, Sabrina, Julie Brody, Phil Brown, and Ruth Polk. 2004. “Public Involvement in
Breast Cancer Research: an Analysis and Model for Future Research.” International Journal of
Health Services 34(4):625–46.
Morello-Frosch, Rachel, Manuel Pastor, and James Sadd. 2002. “Integrating Environmental
Justice and the Precautionary Principle in Research and Policy Making: The Case of Ambient
Air Toxics Exposures and Health Risks among Schoolchildren in Los Angeles.” The Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 584: 47-68.
O'Fallon, Liam R., and Allen Dearry. 2002. "Community-Based Participatory Research as a Tool
to Advance Environmental Health Sciences." Environmental Health Perspectives. 110:155-159.
Shostak, Sara. 2004. “Environmental Justice and Genomics: Acting on the Futures of
Environmental Health.” Science as Culture. 13(4): 539-562.
Vogel. Sarah. 2009. “The Politics of Plastics: The Making and Unmaking of Bisphenol A
‘Safety’” American Journal of Public Health. 2009. 99:S559–S566
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Social Movements
Critical Texts
Brulle, Robert J. Agency, Democracy, and Nature: The U.S. Environmental Movement from a
Critical Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental
Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Martinez-Alier, Joan The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and
Valuation. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2002.
For Further Reading
Alinsky, Saul. 1971. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York:
Random House.
Bell, Shannon. Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for
Environmental Justice 2013 University of Illinois Press.
Benford, Robert and David Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: an
Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26:611–39.
Benford, Robert D., Helen A. Moore, and J. Allen Williams, Jr. 1993. “In Whose Backyard?:
Concern About Siting a Nuclear Waste Facility.” Sociological Inquiry. 63(1): 30-48.
Brown, Phil and Edwin Mikkelsen. 1990. No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and
Community Action. Berkeley: University of California Press
Brown, Phil and Faith Ferguson 'Making a Big Stink': Women's Work, Women's Relationships,
and Toxic Waste Activism" Gender & Society , 1995, 9:145-172.
Brown, Phil Stephen Zavestoski , Sabrina McCormick, Brian Mayer, Rachel Morello-Frosch,
and Rebecca Gasior. “Embodied Health Movements: Uncharted Territory in Social Movement
Research” Sociology of Health and Illness 2004 26:1-31
Brulle, Robert J. 2000. Agency, Democracy, and Nature: U.S. Environmental Movements from a
Critical Theory Perspective. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Mark Dowie. Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth
Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
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Dunlap, Riley and Angela Mertig (eds.), American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental
Movement 1970-1990. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis. Chapters by Dunlap and Mertig, Bullard
and Wright, and Dunlap.
Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure Science AIDS, activism and the politics of knowledge.
Berkeley: University of California Press
Faber, Daniel (ed.). The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements
in the United States. New York: Guilford, 1998.
Faber, Daniel (ed.). Foundations for Social Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and
Social Movements (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Fischer, Frank. Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge. 2000
Duke
Frickel, Scott . “Scientist Activism in Environmental Justice Conflicts: An Argument for
Synergy” Society and Natural Resources 2004 17:359-366
Fortun, Kim. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmental, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Gerlach and Hines. 1970. People, Power Change: Movements of Social Transformation.
Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Harrison, J. L. 2014. “Neoliberal Environmental Justice: Mainstream Ideas of Justice in Political
Conflict Over Agricultural Pesticides in the United States.” Environmental Politics (ahead-ofprint):1–20.
Hofrichter, Richard Reclaimning the Environmental Debate; The Politics of Health in a Toxic
Culture 2000 MIT Press
Kasper, Anne and Susan Ferguson , eds., Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic
Krauss, Celene. 1989. “Community Struggles and the Shaping of Democratic Consciousness.”
Sociological Forum. 4 (2): 227-239.
Kroll-Smith, J. Stephen and Stephen Robert Couch The Real Disaster Is Above Ground: A Mine
Fire and Social Conflict 2009 University Press of Kentucky
Levine, Adeline. Love Canal 1982 Lexington Books
Mayer, Brian. 2009. “Cross-Movement Coalition Formation: Bridging the Labor-Environment
Divide.” Sociological Inquiry 79(2), 219-239.
Mayer, Brian. Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities.
2008. Cornell University Press.
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McCormick, Sabrina. Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation, and the Remaking of
Knowledge 2009, Temple University Press.
Meyer, David. 2004. “Protest and Political Opportunities.” Annual Review of Sociology 30:125–
45.
Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva Ecofeminism 2014 Zed Books.
Polletta, Francesca and James Jasper. 2001. “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual
Review of Sociology27:283–305
Sawyer, Susan: Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in
Ecuador (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
Schurman, Rachel and William Munro Fighting for the Future of Food; Activists Versus
Agribusiness in the Struggle over Biotechnology 2010 University of Minnesota Press
Seager, Joni Earth Follies; Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis
1993 Routledge
Setterberg, Fred and Lonny Shavelson Toxic Nation; The Fight to Save our Communities from
Chemical Contamination 1993 Wiley
Phil Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement. Washington,
D.C.: Island Press, 2004.
Shutkin, William. The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the TwentyFirst Century MIT Press
Taylor, Dorceta. Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection: Social Inequality and the
Rise of the American Conservation Movement. Duke University Press. (2014).
Tesh, Sylvia Noble Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof 2000
Cornell University Press
Walsh, Edward J., Rex Warland, and D. Clayton Smith. 1993. “Backyards, NIMBY’s, and
Incinerator Sitings: Implications for Social Movement Theory.” Social Problems 40(1): 25-34
Widener, Patricia Oil Injustice: Resisting and Conceding a Pipeline in Ecuador. 2011 Rowman
and Littlefield
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Political Economy Of The Environment
Critical Texts
Carmin, JoAnn, J. Timmons Roberts, and Thomas K. Rudel. 2010. “Political Economy of the
Environment.” Annual Review of Sociology.
Faber, Daniel, Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the
Age of Globalization
O’Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford, 1998.
Gould, Kenneth A., David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg. The Treadmill of Production:
Injustice and Unsustainability in the World Economy. Paradigm, 2008.
Additional Readings
Banzhaf, H. Spencer (ed). The Political Economy of Environmental Justice. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012.
Bell, Shannon and Richard York. 2010. “Community Economic Identity: The Coal Industry and
Ideology Construction in West Virginia.” Rural Sociology
Bunker, Stephen and Paul Ciccantell. 2003. “Generative sectors and the new historical
materialism.” Studies in comparative international development. 37(4):3-30.
Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on
the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011.
Gould, Kenneth, Allan Schnaiberg, and Adam Weinberg. 1996. Local Environmental Struggles:
Citizen Activism in the Treadmill of Production. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Jorgensen, A and B Clark. 2009. “Ecological unequal exchange in comparative perspective: A
brief introduction.” International journal of comparative sociology. 50: 211-14.
Logan, John R. and Harvey Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: the Political Economy of Place.
Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
Logan, John R., Rachel Bridges Whaley, and Kyle Crowder. 1997. "The Character and
Consequences of Growth Regimes: An Assessment of Twenty Years of Research" Urban Affairs
Review. 32: 603-630.
Mol, Arthur, David Sonnenfeld, and Gert Spaargaren, eds. The Cological Modernization Reader:
Environmental Reform in Theory and Practice. 2009. Routledge.
Morello-Frosch, Rachel. 2002. “Discrimination and the Political Economy of Environmental
Inequality.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 20: 477-496.
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Noble, David F. America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
Oxford University Press: Oxford 1977
Oreskes, Naomi and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists
Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury
Press.
Rudel, Thomas K. 2009. “How Do People Transform Landscapes?: A Sociological Perspective
on Suburban Sprawl and Tropical Deforestation.” American Journal of Sociology. 115(1):129154.
Scott, James C.1998. Seeing like a state : how certain schemes to improve the human condition
have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sellers, Christopher C. 1997. Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental
Health Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Shiva, Vandana. Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land, and Food Wars.
Women Unlimited, 2012.
Szasz, Andrew. 2007. Shopping our Way to Safety: How we Changed from Protecting the
Environment to Protecting Ourselves. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
York, Richard, Eugene Rosa, and Thomas Dietz. 2003. “Footprints on the Earth: The
Environmental Consequences of Modernity.” American Sociological Review. 68:2 (279-300).
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Environmental Justice
Critical Texts
Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the
Environmental Justice Movement 2000 NYU Press.
Mohai, Paul, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts. 2009. “Environmental Justice.” Annual
Review of Environment and Resources. Vol. 34 (November 2009)
Walker, Gordon. Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence and Politics. New York:
Routledge, 2012.
Additional Readings
Agyeman, Julian, Robert Bullard, and Bob Evans. Eds. Just Sustainabilities: Development in an
Unequal World MIT Press
Allen, Barbara: “Uneasy Alchemy Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor
Disputes” 2003, MIT Press
Bell, Karen. Achieving Environmental Justice: A Cross-National Analysis. Chicago: Policy
Press, 2014.
Bullard, Robert and Beverly Wright. 2009. Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After
Hurricane Katrina. Philadelphia: Westview Press.
Bullard, Robert. 1990. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder:
Westview Press.
Robert D. Bullard and Maxine Waters. The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the
Politics of Pollution. Counterpoint, 2005.
Corburn, Jason Street Science Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice
Susan Cutter. Hazards, Vulnerability and Environmental Justice. London: Earthscan, 2006.
Harrison, Jill. 2011. Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice.
Lerner, Steve. 2005. Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical
Corridor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lerner, Steve. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United
States. 2010 MIT Press
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Ottinger, Gwen and Benjamin Cohen, eds., Engineers, Scientists, and Environmental Justice .
2011. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pellow, David, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice
Pellow, David and Robert Brulle, eds. Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical
Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. 2005. MIT Press
Sandler, Ronald and Phaedra Pezzullo Environmental Justice and Environmentalism : The
Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. 2007. MIT Press
Schlosberg, David, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Sze, Julie and Jonathan K. London. “Environmental Justice at a Crossroads.” Sociology Compass
2/4 (2008): 1331-1354.
Taylor, Dorceta Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and
Residential Mobility. New York University Press. (2014).
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STS and the Environment
Critical Texts
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science. New York: Routledge. Chapter on Teddy-Bear Patriarchy.
Murphy, Michelle. 2006. Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty: Environmental
Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Latour Bruno: (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through
Society. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air Pump. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Additional Readings
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its
Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Certeau, Michel "Making Do: Uses and Tactics" in The Practice of Everyday Life, University of
California Press, 1984
da Costa, Beatriz and Kavita Philip, eds. 2008. Tactical Biopolitics Art, Activism, and
Technoscience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Edwards, Paul N. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of
Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Frickel, Scott and Kelly Moore (eds.). 2006. The New Political Sociology of Science:
Institutions, Networks, and Power. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Haraway, Donna.1997. Modest Witness@SecondMillennium. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hayden, Cori. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in
Mexico, In-Formation Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United
States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kohler, Robert E. 1994. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kohler, Robert 2002. Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996.
Landecker, Hannah. 2007. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nash, Linda. 2004. “The Fruits of Ill-Health: Pesticides and Workers' Bodies in Post-World War
II California” Osiris, 2nd Series, 19: 203-219.
Nash, Linda. 2006. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge.
Berkeley: University of California.
Petryna, A. (2002). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, Princeton
University Press.
Rampton, Sheldon and John Stauber. 2000. Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates
Science and Gambles with your Future. New York: Tarcher.
Rheinberger Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in
the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Thompson, Nato and Gregory, Sholette. 2004. The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the
Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA Publications.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection Princeton University
Press (2005)
Waterton, Claire. 2002. From Field to Fantasy: Classifying Nature, Constructing Europe. Social
Studies of Science 32: 177-204.
Wylie, Sara. 2011. Hormone Mimics and their Promise of Significant Otherness. Science as
Culture. 1-28
Winner, Langdon. 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus109 (1): 121-136.
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Energy, Food, and Natural Resources
Critical Readings
Frederick H. Buttel, “Some Reflections on Late Twentieth Century Agrarian Political Economy,”
Sociologia Ruralis 41 (April), 2001: 165-81.
Julie Guthman. 2011. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism.
University of California Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. “Carbon Democracy.” Economy and Society 38(3): 399–432.
Additional Readings
Alkon, Allison and Julian Agyeman Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability
2011 MIT Press.
Black, Brian. Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton.
Cronon, William 1995. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York:
Norton and Co.
W.W.
Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.
Fitzgerald, Deborah. 'Every Farm a Factory': The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
William Heffernan, “Concentration of Ownership and Control in Agriculture.” Pp. 61- 75 in
Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, Magdoff, F,
Foster, J.B. and Buttel, F.H., editors, (NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000)
Hesterman, Oran B. 2012. Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All.
PublicAffairs.
Hightower, Jim. Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: A Report of the Agribusiness Accountability
Project on the Failure of America's Land Grant College Complex. Rochester, Vermont:
Schenkman, 1978.
Holmes, Seth. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, 2013.
University of California Press.
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McNeill, John Robert. 2000. Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World. New York: W. W. Norton.
Melosi, Martin. 2000. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times
to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nye, David E. Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1998.
Pollan, Michael. Omnivore’s Dilemma
Russell, Edmund. 2001. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from
World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sawyer, Richard C. To Make A Spotless Orange: Biological Control in California. Ames: Iowa
State University Press, 1996.
Steinberg, Theodore. 2002. Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Walley, Christine. 2013. Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago. University of
Chicago Press.
White, Richard. 1995. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York:
Hill and Wang.
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