Student and Public Resources
Linked below are non-exhaustive lists that I have compiled over the past several years of resources for students, or anyone else who might be interested in environmental sociology, politics, political economy, visual sociology, and more. This is by no means exhaustive and is meant to be an aggregation point for the materials that I often use in my teaching, publishing, and mentoring. Additionally, I have had many colleagues ask me to give advice about journals, and so, I have listed some of the journals I often look to for inspiration and as potential outlets for my own research and writing. These are resources that I have found to be accessible in terms of the intellectual components and many are open-access. I hope there can be something interesting and inspiring here for you!
Administration
Websites and Blogs
American Sociological Association Section on Environmental Sociology
American Sociological Association Section on Political Economy and the World-System
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (website, blog, podcast, and peer-reviewed academic journal)
Podcasts
Films
Books
The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination by Matthew Gandy (2014)
Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West by Donald Worster (1992)
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest (1998) by Wendy Espeland
The Metabolic Landscape: Perception, Practice and the Energy Transition (2014) by Gina Glover, Geof Rayner, and Jessica Rayner
The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America (2021) by Michael Carriere and David Schalliol
Classification Struggles: General Sociology, Volume 1 (2019) by Pierre Bourdieu
The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn (2007) by Pierre Bourdieu
The Sociological Imagination (1959) by C. Wright Mills
On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2007) by Matthew Desmond
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015) by Jason W. Moore
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) by David Harvey
Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2022) by Loïc Wacquant
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1999) by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) by Friedrich Engels
Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior (1967) by Erving Goffman
Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (1991) by Michael Burawoy and colleagues
Postmodernism Is Not What You Think (2006) by Charles Lemert
Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West (2019) by Eric Perramond
From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (2007) by Zsuzsa Gille
Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (1989) by Philippe Bourgois
Fish Story (2018) by Allan Sekula
Favorite Articles
-If you can’t find a pdf of any of the below, email me, [or better yet, the author] and I will send it to you. However, many are hyperlinked to the pdf for your convenience. This list is ongoing and it exists in no particular order. Many of these articles are not particularly heavily cited. It occurred to me that these are some of my “favorites,” not because I write in these subfields, know these scholars, or even cite these authors very much, but because I have bothered to keep hardcopies, notate them, lose them and reprint them only to discover an old copy under a pile of other articles, and often refer to them when I am trying to write my own articles and chapters. When I bothered to ask myself why I was doing this, I realized that these pieces have the double advantage of speaking to a substantive issue in the social sciences as much as to the craft of writing research. They are a source of inspiration and what I wish I could see and read more of, and so I hope they might be helpful to you as well.
Carolan, Michael. "Sociological ambivalence and climate change." Local environment 15, no. 4 (2010): 309-321.
Desmond, Matthew. "Becoming a firefighter." Ethnography 7, no. 4 (2006): 387-421.
Schneider, Matthew Jerome. "Exotic place, white space: Racialized volunteer spaces in Honduras." In Sociological Forum, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 690-711. 2018.
Gandy, Matthew. "An Arkansas parable for the Anthropocene." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112, no. 2 (2022): 368-386.
Bourdieu, Pierre. "A conservative revolution in publishing." Translation studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 123-153.
Wacquant, Loïc. "Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and democratic politics." Constellations 11, no. 1 (2004): 3-15.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. "On the cunning of imperialist reason." Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 41-58.
Sallaz, Jeffrey J. "Politics of organizational adornment: Lessons from Las Vegas and beyond." American sociological review 77, no. 1 (2012): 99-119.
Gibson-Light, Michael. "Remote control: Horizontal surveillance and the gendering of carceral punishment." Theoretical Criminology (2022): 13624806221082094.
Leguizamón, Amalia. "Disappearing nature? Agribusiness, biotechnology and distance in Argentine soybean production." The Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 313-330.
Goffman, Erving. "On fieldwork." Journal of contemporary ethnography 18, no. 2 (1989): 123-132.
Wacquant, Loïc. "Scrutinizing the street: Poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography." American journal of sociology 107, no. 6 (2002): 1468-1532.
Burawoy, Michael. "Combat in the dissertation zone." The American Sociologist 36, no. 2 (2005): 43-56.
Burawoy, Michael. "Empiricism and its fallacies." Contexts 18, no. 1 (2019): 47-53.
Burawoy, Michael. "On Desmond: the limits of spontaneous sociology." Theory and Society 46, no. 4 (2017): 261-284.
Fine, Gary Alan. "Ten lies of ethnography: Moral dilemmas of field research." Journal of contemporary ethnography 22, no. 3 (1993): 267-294.
Bond, Patrick. "Economic growth, ecological modernization or environmental justice? Conflicting discourses in post‐apartheid South Africa." Capitalism Nature Socialism 11, no. 1 (2000): 33-61.
Boykoff, Jules. "The leaf blower, capitalism, and the atomization of everyday life." Capitalism Nature Socialism 22, no. 3 (2011): 95-113.
Gille, Zsuzsa. "Actor networks, modes of production, and waste regimes: reassembling the macro-social." Environment and Planning A 42, no. 5 (2010): 1049-1064.
Gille, Zsuzsa, and Seán Ó. Riain. "Global ethnography." Annual Review of Sociology (2002): 271-295.
Steinmetz, George. "Odious comparisons: Incommensurability, the case study, and “small N's” in sociology." Sociological theory 22, no. 3 (2004): 371-400.
Steinmetz, George. "Bourdieu's disavowal of Lacan: psychoanalytic theory and the concepts of “habitus” and “symbolic capital”." Constellations 13, no. 4 (2006): 445-464.
Steinmetz, George. "Harrowed landscapes: white ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit and the cultivation of memory." Visual Studies 23, no. 3 (2008): 211-237.
Liao, Tim F. "Visual symbolism, collective memory, and social protest: a study of the 2009 London G20 protest [Paper in themed section: The Visual Narrative: Alternative Photographic Exposures. Livingston, Debra (ed.).]." Social Alternatives 29, no. 4 (2010): 37-43.
Sekula, Allan. "Geography lesson: Canadian notes." Assemblage 6 (1988): 25-47.
Bohr, Jeremiah. "The ‘climatism’cartel: why climate change deniers oppose market-based mitigation policy." Environmental Politics 25, no. 5 (2016): 812-830.
Dekeyser, Thomas, and Bradley L. Garrett. "Ethics≠ law." Area50, no. 3 (2018): 410-417.
Marion, Jonathan S. "Photography as ethnographic passport." Visual Anthropology Review 26, no. 1 (2010): 25-31.
Deener, Andrew. "Commerce as the structure and symbol of neighborhood life: Reshaping the meaning of community in Venice, California." City & Community 6, no. 4 (2007): 291-314.
Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals
Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals that (generally) consider unsolicited Book Reviews and Various Essay Formats