Scott Frickel
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 255646 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Scott Frickel |
| NOMBRES | Scott |
| APELLIDO | Frickel |
| FIRMA | FRICKEL S |
| AFILIACIONES | Washington State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7368-885X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 54 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 916 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Inconvenient Truths
Social movements are shaped by the stories that activists and organizers tell about them. As movement stories are told and retold, codified into narratives and woven together, they structure collective understanding around a movement's shared history and imagined future. We unpack three prominent narratives of the modern United States environmental movement which are often pegged to the first Earth Day in 1970 as representing: (1) a shifting focu…
Community Resilience Planning
Community resilience planning (CRP) research encompasses diverse disciplinary foci, ranging from ecological and sociopolitical to engineering studies, and employs a range of analytic scales and methodologies. Despite the rise of integrative approaches to studying increasingly complex risks faced by communities—in particular, the growing, and often inequitable, impacts of climate and weather stressors and extremes—CRP remains a fragmented field of…
Embodied, embedded or both? Investigating experts and expertise in two Greater Boston social movements
This study employs quantitative and qualitative data from a large diverse sample of scientists and professionals active in Greater Boston's environmental and community development movements to pursue two lines of inquiry regarding experts and expertise in social movements. Statistical analysis and supporting qualitative analysis investigate, first, the extent to which expert's professional training and employment predict their mobilization into d…
Parks, People, and Pollution
The urban environmental inequality literature holds that marginalized communities are generally concentrated in neighborhoods with greater levels of industrial pollution and lesser access to parks and playfields. Yet, “green” and “brown” land uses are also linked historically and through contemporary practices of green redevelopment. This article thus begins from the understanding that it is important to analyze both forms of urban land use at on…
The Environmental State
Basic oppositions between economic growth and environmental protection are well understood by sociologists, but the state's role in environmental protection and regulation is underspecified in sociological theory. We define the environmental state and theorize two structuring forces central to its provision of environmental welfare. First, culturally distinctive constructions of nature shape environmental politics and statecraft. State actions li…
Long after 'People before Highways
The study investigates the way local social movements respond to structural transformations in city politics. Drawing from archival research, published scholarship, and 51 in-depth interviews, we characterize the mobilization of experts into social movements in Greater Boston since the 1960s as a long-term shift from 'protecting places' to 'providing services.' Consonant with a shift from centralized to decentralized municipal government, we show…
Early Childcare and Education in a Post-Industrial Landscape
Children are uniquely vulnerable to environmental health risks associated with industrial contamination, and early childcare and education (ECE) facilities are important sites for potential exposure to environmental contaminants. Emerging research on historic urban industry has additionally demonstrated that urban environmental risk accumulates historically and spatially across urban landscapes. Accordingly, this study pairs cross-sectional data …
Future flooding increases unequal exposure risks to relic industrial pollution
Climate change is increasing the probability that urban communities with lengthy histories of land-based industrial pollution and ongoing residential segregation will experience more frequent and destructive flooding in the years ahead. This paper investigates where these past, present, and future forces will converge to potentially produce a new type of climate injustice, as the flooding of former, or ‘relic,’ industrial sites threatens to trans…
When Environmental Inequality Racialized
The authors use multiple logistic regression techniques to investigate whether individuals' occupation, nativity, race, and ethnicity predict residential proximity to large-scale energy infrastructure in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1880 and 1930. Results indicate that in 1880, environmental risks associated with urban energy infrastructure fell most heavily on working-class immigrants; by 1930, those risks disproportionately affected the city's …
Mobilizing environmental experts and expertise
At its core, environmental politics are epistemic politics: contests over what is known or unknown about nature and who gets to speak for it. This chapter’s main focus is the politics of expertise that inevitably ensues from these battles. Discussion of extant work highlights how expert activists are organized and what effects expert mobilization has on science, environmental conflict, and socioecological change more broadly. We begin by describi…
Residues
Drought, Hurricane, or Wildfire? Assessing the Trump Administration’s Anti-Science Disaster
We describe the Trump Administration as an “anti-science disaster” and approach study of the phenomenon as other disaster researchers might study the impacts of a drought, hurricane, or wildfire. An important, but rare, element of disaster research is identification of baseline data that allow scientific assessment of changes in social and natural systems. We describe three potential baselines for assessing the nature and impact of Trump’s anti-s…
Riding a long green wave
What accounts for the remarkable growth of environmental sciences and studies (ESS) in US higher education over the past 50 years? This paper focuses on institutional characteristics to explain this ‘long green wave’ of expansion. Drawing on data from 1345 US higher-education institutions from 1980–2010, we employ three-level hierarchical models to assess institutional and state-level factors associated with the presence of environmental studies …
The Unknowers
With The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World, Linsey McGoey commands her position as one of Ignorance Studies’ premier ambassadors.1 The book is a welcome contribution to the field
Do Legacy Industrial Sites Produce Legacy Effects in Ethnic and Racial Residential Settlement? Environmental Inequality Formation in Rhode Island’s Industrial Core 1
This study advances understanding of environmental inequality by examining its production through the interaction of two ubiquitous and ongoing urban‐ecological processes: industrial land‐use changes and changing patterns of residential segregation. We employ longitudinal data from the Rhode Island Directory of Manufacturers (1953–2012) and tract‐level US Census data measured at four panel‐years (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010) to study the effects o…
Toxic truths
Political strategies for seeking environmental justice Introduction to Part III -Alice Mah 8 Legitimating confrontational discourses by local environmental groups: The case of air quality monitoring in a Spanish industrial area -Miguel A
Nested logics and smart meter adoption
Residues
This essay offers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impact of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. Environmental protection regimes tend to be highly segmented according to place, media, substance, and effect. Existing scholarship often reflects this same segmentation, by focusing on a locality, specific chemical, social movement, or regulatory body. In turn, as new environmental measures are introduced …
Power to the people
This paper refines understanding of industrial transition movements by focusing on ‘energy populism’ as a framing and frame amplification device that informs anti-smart meter activism in the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on interviews with activists, utilities regulators and engineers involved in smart meter implementation across the region, we examine the energy populism frame and its implications for renewable energy transitions more generally. We…
Political Scientists
This essay raises several issues triggered by Norah Mackendrick's (2017) piece “Out of the Labs and into the Streets,” which appeared in “The Forum.” Using that essay as a springboard, I reflect on the complicated relationship between science and politics
The Politics of Invisibility
Lost in space
This chapter takes up the problem of ignorance and geographical space from the vantage point of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It follows fellow STSers in viewing ignorance as a cultural artifact whose production is deeply intertwined with epistemic, social, and spatial processes. The chapter discusses the geographical concepts that have relevance for studies of the social production of ignorance. After briefly exploring the relevance of “…
The Organization of Expert Activism
The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of “shadow mobilization” to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk an…
In Defense of Disciplines
Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession
This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analys…
A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements
The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual mov…
Interdisciplinarity
This article draws together disparate research and theorizing on interdisciplinarity. We first describe widespread efforts to promote interdisciplinarity in U.S. universities and critically examine the assumptions underlying these initiatives. Next, we present a cross-sectional view of interdisciplinary communication, knowledge diffusion, research assessment, and interdisciplinary research centers. We then describe research and theories that prov…
Beyond the nature/society divide
Undone Science
Undone science'' refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politic…
The Historical Nature of Cities
Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containi…
Science and neoliberal globalization
Hurricane Katrina, contamination, and the unintended organization of ignorance
Ecological Threat and the Founding of U.S. National Environmental Movement Organizations, 1962–1998
This study examines the role of "ecological threat" in shaping the U.S. environmental movement. Statistical analysis combines founding data on 772 national environmental movement organizations with ecological data on air pollution levels and amphibian and bird populations. We examine these data longitudinally, from 1962 through 1998. Net of other social, economic, and political factors suggested by social movement theory, we find evidence of segm…
Digging Deeper
The implications of natural resource extraction for local economic development have become the subject of sharply conflicting expectations, with long-term outcomes predicted to range from regional economic growth and development to 'progressive underdevelopment.' These differences in longer-term expectations cannot be satisfactorily resolved through the use of cross-sectional or short-term data. In addition, existing theories tend to be stated in…
Building an Interdiscipline
Journal Article Building an Interdiscipline: Collective Action Framing and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology Get access Scott Frickel Scott Frickel Tulane University Direct correspondence to: Scott Frickel, Department of Sociology, 220 Newcomb Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 51, Issue 2, 1 May 2004, Page…
Toxic truths
Political strategies for seeking environmental justice Introduction to Part III -Alice Mah 8 Legitimating confrontational discourses by local environmental groups: The case of air quality monitoring in a Spanish industrial area -Miguel A
Just science? Organizing scientist activism in the US environmental justice movement
Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession
This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analys…
Toxic Bodies/Toxic Environments
Mining the Past
Residents and leaders of rural or less-developed regions often believe that the exploitation of natural resources will provide an antidote to regional poverty, but the research literature on the topic is decidedly mixed. While many development economists have predicted regional benefits from resource extraction, other analysts have differed; in particular, many dependency scholars have predicted increasing “underdevelopment,” and a number of natu…
The Organization of Expert Activism
The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of “shadow mobilization” to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk an…
Political Scientists
This essay raises several issues triggered by Norah Mackendrick's (2017) piece “Out of the Labs and into the Streets,” which appeared in “The Forum.” Using that essay as a springboard, I reflect on the complicated relationship between science and politics
Building Environmental States
This article explores the potential for nation-states to become substantial contributors to sustainability governance. This potential resides in the ability of nation-states to make environmental protection a basic goal, in part by committing institutional resources toward the formation and implementation of substantive actions perceived necessary for long-term environmental sustainability. Existing research suggests that nation-states undertake …
Privacy, technology, and norms
Do Legacy Industrial Sites Produce Legacy Effects in Ethnic and Racial Residential Settlement? Environmental Inequality Formation in Rhode Island’s Industrial Core 1
This study advances understanding of environmental inequality by examining its production through the interaction of two ubiquitous and ongoing urban‐ecological processes: industrial land‐use changes and changing patterns of residential segregation. We employ longitudinal data from the Rhode Island Directory of Manufacturers (1953–2012) and tract‐level US Census data measured at four panel‐years (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010) to study the effects o…
Scientist Activism in Environmental Justice Conflicts
This essay examines the problem of scientist activism as a specialized form of environmental struggle. Following research on “state-society synergy,” the author argues that this framework encourages a broader view of scientist environmental activism and its socially embedded character “in between” states and civil society. Environmental research and advocacy networks crisscross the public–private divide, linking scientists to one another, to stat…
Crossing the next divide
Nested logics and smart meter adoption
Environmental Dimensions of Urban Change
Contemporary urbanization has brought well-documented shifts in the social and economic foundations of U.S. cities through deindustrialization, gentrification, and residential segregation. To these widely recognized shifts, we add historical–environmental changes associated with “relict industrial waste” that accumulates and becomes hidden as cities change over time. This study advances a new analytical framework and data collection strategy for …
Engineering Heterogeneous Accounts
Within science and technology studies, few approaches have generated more contention-or more misunderstanding-than the "actor-network" analyses of Callon, Latour, and Law. Although many have taken critical issue with this approach, few studies have engaged the strengths and weaknesses of actor-network theory on its own terms. This article presents two arguments that constitute a critical engagement across (rather than against) actor-network terra…
Digging Deeper
The implications of natural resource extraction for local economic development have become the subject of sharply conflicting expectations, with long-term outcomes predicted to range from regional economic growth and development to 'progressive underdevelopment.' These differences in longer-term expectations cannot be satisfactorily resolved through the use of cross-sectional or short-term data. In addition, existing theories tend to be stated in…
Beyond the nature/society divide
Crossing the next divide
Engineering Heterogeneous Accounts
Within science and technology studies, few approaches have generated more contention-or more misunderstanding-than the "actor-network" analyses of Callon, Latour, and Law. Although many have taken critical issue with this approach, few studies have engaged the strengths and weaknesses of actor-network theory on its own terms. This article presents two arguments that constitute a critical engagement across (rather than against) actor-network terra…
Mining the Past
Residents and leaders of rural or less-developed regions often believe that the exploitation of natural resources will provide an antidote to regional poverty, but the research literature on the topic is decidedly mixed. While many development economists have predicted regional benefits from resource extraction, other analysts have differed; in particular, many dependency scholars have predicted increasing “underdevelopment,” and a number of natu…
Diversity and diversion
Examines the debate over “Higher superstition” (Gross and Levitt, 1994). Puts forward the arguments in the book and the response to the book from members of the US science and technology studies community. Asserts that increases in technical control have been at the expense of social and individual control. Mentions “diversionary reframing” – changing the subject, possibly by diverting attention away from the subject matter to the person doing th…
Understanding Environmental Governance
This article presents an historical sketch of the insights and applications provided by social science scholars on environmental governance. The authors begin with a review of the conceptual developments during the past 50 years characterized in terms of six conceptual perspectives: pluralism, agency capture, ecological Marxism, ecological modernization, social constructionism, and global environmentalism. This section is followed by an empirical…
Just science? Organizing scientist activism in the US environmental justice movement
Scientist Activism in Environmental Justice Conflicts
This essay examines the problem of scientist activism as a specialized form of environmental struggle. Following research on “state-society synergy,” the author argues that this framework encourages a broader view of scientist environmental activism and its socially embedded character “in between” states and civil society. Environmental research and advocacy networks crisscross the public–private divide, linking scientists to one another, to stat…
Science in the Modern World Polity
Building an Interdiscipline
Journal Article Building an Interdiscipline: Collective Action Framing and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology Get access Scott Frickel Scott Frickel Tulane University Direct correspondence to: Scott Frickel, Department of Sociology, 220 Newcomb Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 51, Issue 2, 1 May 2004, Page…
Building Environmental States
This article explores the potential for nation-states to become substantial contributors to sustainability governance. This potential resides in the ability of nation-states to make environmental protection a basic goal, in part by committing institutional resources toward the formation and implementation of substantive actions perceived necessary for long-term environmental sustainability. Existing research suggests that nation-states undertake …
A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements
The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual mov…
The New Political Sociology of Science
New Political Sociology of Science
Hurricane Katrina, contamination, and the unintended organization of ignorance
Tracking Industrial Land Use Conversions
Research on urban development and environmental hazards has focused attention on problems associated with current industrial facilities, derelict industrial brownfields, and government-listed hazardous waste sites. Yet we continue to know very little about environmental contaminants remaining on past industrial sites that have since converted to other uses. This article develops a methodology for examining the prevalence of such sites and their h…
Toxic Bodies/Toxic Environments
Mapping knowledge investments in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
Interdisciplinarity
This article draws together disparate research and theorizing on interdisciplinarity. We first describe widespread efforts to promote interdisciplinarity in U.S. universities and critically examine the assumptions underlying these initiatives. Next, we present a cross-sectional view of interdisciplinary communication, knowledge diffusion, research assessment, and interdisciplinary research centers. We then describe research and theories that prov…
Undone Science
Undone science'' refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politic…
Global Environment and Human Development
Most review essays appearing in Contem porary Sociology compare monographs that approach shared topics in different ways. The United Nations Development Pro gramme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports (HDR) reviewed here are something different, but merit serious sociological attention nonetheless. While the reports are similar in the abstract?taking as an over arching theme the likely negative conse quences of environmental degradation on human so…
Environmental Dimensions of Urban Change
Contemporary urbanization has brought well-documented shifts in the social and economic foundations of U.S. cities through deindustrialization, gentrification, and residential segregation. To these widely recognized shifts, we add historical–environmental changes associated with “relict industrial waste” that accumulates and becomes hidden as cities change over time. This study advances a new analytical framework and data collection strategy for …
Ecological Threat and the Founding of U.S. National Environmental Movement Organizations, 1962–1998
This study examines the role of "ecological threat" in shaping the U.S. environmental movement. Statistical analysis combines founding data on 772 national environmental movement organizations with ecological data on air pollution levels and amphibian and bird populations. We examine these data longitudinally, from 1962 through 1998. Net of other social, economic, and political factors suggested by social movement theory, we find evidence of segm…
Science and neoliberal globalization
Political science (36 obras) · Sociology (36 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (20 obras) · Social science (17 obras) · Geography (16 obras) · Economics (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Engineering (11 obras)