TEACHING:

Pedagogy: Learning is work, work of the best kind... and learning is best done when a "teacher" isn't lecturing. Even though a good bit of it can be drudgery, the Aha! moments are worth every bit of effort and sweat. Key to this, however, are a set of skills associated with reading, synthesizing and presenting material. All of my teaching, from 8-person graduate seminars to 300 student general education classes combines socratic, feminist and multi-disciplinary practices and texts.

While there are whole schools of thought exchanging salvos as to the best approach to reading and presenting material, I find that Paul N. Edwards' (University of Michigan, School of Information) suggestions for reading and sharing academic materials resonate well with approaches I embrace. PDF file versions of his "How to Read a Book" and "How to Give and Academic Talk" (which might as well be "How to Present Material to Others.") are linked here.

Syllabi for the courses I have taught are linked below.

Soc 100: Introductory Sociology (Fall 2006)

Soc 368: Science, Technology and Society (Fall 2005)

Soc 403: Political Sociology (Fall 2006)

Soc 499: Social Change and Issues in Contemporary Society (Spring 1999)

ISS 310: People and Environment (Spring 2000, 2002)

Soc 815: Classical Social Theory (Fall 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004)

Soc 816: Contemporary Social Theory (Spring 2001, 2003, 2005)

Soc 865: Environmental Sociology (Fall 1999, 2001, Spring 2006)

Soc 890: Science and Technology: Advanced Readings (Spring 2001).

Soc 931: Advanced Topics in Structural Inequality: The Marxist Canon: Dialectics, Capital and Space (Spring 2002)

Independent Study: Feminist Science, Technology and Medicine (Fall 2004)

The link to the Summer Presentation below is to the Powerpoint off of which I presented the structure and meaning of the social sciences to incoming freshman intending to major in the social sciences.

College of Social Science -- Summer 02 Presentation

RESEARCH:

My research combines regional sociological, environmental sociological and science and technological studies. Regional sociological perspectives -- updated by the last twenty years of developments in regional, economic and cultural geography -- situate the environmental and agricultural research I practice.

This means that the empirical social problems I study are contextualized such that both material and spatial processes are always at hand. These processes are them both political economic and political ecological in nature... In this context, the political economic perspectives I draw upon are those related to the accumulation, legitimation and fiscal crises/questions that set the stage for neoliberal globalization and the assocaited rise of outcome- and standards-based, audit- and certification-enforced modes of political, economic and social governance.

At the same time, my political ecological commitments are such that the uneven and hybrid concerns of contemporary social movements with ecological, scientific, personal, medical, infrastructural and cultural reproduction are made central. Today's environmental, health and cultural movements are coincident and overlap and, wherever one starts or whatever is prioritized, questions of and risks related to science, technology, and development are raised. Put another way, I've yet to find and environmental question that, with apologies to Raymond Williams (1980: 67), does not "contain[], though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history" and complex struggle.

As such, and drawing on feminist epistemology and other relational ontologies, I find that environmental sociologists tend not only to reify (always already humanized) nature -- as William Cronon (1995) and environmental justice activists in the global North (Bullard 1990; Szasz 1994; Taylor 1997) and South (Guha and Alier 1997; Pulido 1998; Barron 2000) -- but, relatedly, tend to reify science. From the research my students (Jason Konefal, Kathy Wolcott and Christopher Oliver) and I have done, the relation between science and nature and science and policy is more fraught that straightforward.

Recently, this sort of work has focused on the production of insect pests, a compartive study of the historical agricultural land transitions in SW Michigan, and an investigation into the controversial 1998 agreement between UC Berkeley and Novartis AG. More on this as I continue to update this page during December of 2005...

BACKGROUND:

My dissertation (available in relatively unrevised form above [and under revision for January submission to Louisiana State University Press for their geograhy and environmental studies series]) : Completed at UC Santa Cruz in 1995, this work generated a regional study of the Imperial Valley of southeastern California.  Initially it was stimulated by the outbreak of the Silver Leaf whitefly superpest in the early 1990s and was extended following my discovery of the Salton Sea crisis, the pollution of the New River, the region's long history of violent labor struggles and the radical redevelopment of the historically underdeveloped communities in the Valley.

Upon settling in my next position, I have pending collaborations with Dr. Stephanie Pincetl (UCLA) to study the ecological and social consequences of neoliberal water markets in California and with Dr. Scott Whiteford (University of Arizona) to compare the political ecological history of the Imperial Valley with the associated political ecology of the Mexicali Valley across the US border.

Here is a magnificent photo, by Richard Misrach of an abandoned swimming pool/diving board with the Salton Sea in the background.

Additonally, NASA has published the very interesting red Landsat photo of the Imperial Valley below and San Diego State University has published the green one.

On the photos you can see the demarcation of the international border by looking for the difference between the well- and intensively-irrigated fields of California's Imperial Irrigation District (bright red) and the relatively dry, less-intensively irrigated fields surrounding the Mexican city of Mexicali.  The black line that switch-backs from right to left across the white sands to the east is the ironically named All-American Canal by which Colorado River water is transported across the desert floor to the Valley.  The Canal is unlined, it is basically a sandy ditch.  Seepage from the Canal provides "groundwater" for some of the Mexican growers to the south of the canal. Finally, the black blob to the northwest is the Salton Sea -- the super-saline and chemically-polluted "fresh-water lake" that acts as both an agricultural drainage sump and National Wildlife Refuge -- it is dying.

Paul Ganster's Border Environment Research Report (Number 1 - June 1996) Environmental Issues of the California-Baja California Border Region provides an overview of some of the environmental issues in the area.