T E Shriver
Biographic Data
| ID | 17243 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T E Shriver |
| GIVEN NAMES | T E |
| FAMILY NAME | Shriver |
| SIGNATURE | SHRIVER T E |
| AFFILIATIONS | North Carolina State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4868-6449 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 381 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Ecological-Symbolic Perspective and Ontological Security: An Analysis of Lead Contamination
Extant research has investigated dynamics surrounding community division in debates about environmental health hazards and risks. However, additional work is needed to uncover factors that lead people to different interpretations of situations involving threats to human health. We couple the ecological-symbolic perspective and the ontological security framework to increase analytical power in cases of divergent environmental health perspectives. …
Barriers to Hurricane Recovery in Frontline Communities: Climate Injustice on Florida’s West Coast
Extant research has established that increasing global temperatures, sea level rise, and an increase in the severity and intensity of extreme weather events have significant implications for vulnerable communities, especially in coastal regions. We add to this body of literature by drawing on the cases of two recent Florida hurricanes to investigate how coastal communities were impacted by these events. In 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated southwest…
The Impacts of Landscape Loss on Industrial Communities: Solastalgia in Coal Regions
Extant research has documented how coal industries can have devastating impacts on industrial communities. While much of the sociological research on climate change has focused on issues of environmental sustainability and resilience, comparatively less research has centered around the social and emotional consequences of climate change in the context of industrial areas. To attend to this gap in the literature, we investigate how coal communitie…
Environmental Risk and Chemical Weapons Disposal: The Case of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Demilitarization Program
Folk art, storytelling, and space: Collective memory and pesticide exposure
Extant research regarding collective memory has established the importance of examining how socially constructed memories shape group identities, lived experiences, and realities over time. In addition, collective memory scholars have underscored the inextricable and co-shaping linkages between space, place, and collective memory. However, comparatively less is known about how collective memories are constructed and articulated in cases of enviro…
Discursive strategies and activist framing in anti-mining campaigns
A rich body of literature has established the importance of activist framing in environmental controversies. This research suggests that framing and framing contests are nested within broader discursive opportunity structures, which have significant implications for frame resonance and success. While significant research on environmental activism has investigated how activists can fight against new industrial projects, comparatively less is known…
Critical Environmental Justice and Pandemic Events: Florida Farm Work during Covid-19
Extant research has well established that exposure to infectious disease can be a significant problem for vulnerable populations that have been deemed “essential” during widespread health crises. We contribute to this growing body of literature by delineating the utility of the critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework for investigating infectious disease in the context of at-risk groups such as farmworker communities. Specifically, we highl…
Race, Toxic Exposures, and Environmental Health: The Contestation of Lupus among Farmworkers
Extant research has established that low-wage workers of color are at higher risk for occupational exposures. While the medical sociology literature regarding contested illness provides insights into the dynamics surrounding workplace exposures, some environmental illnesses such as lupus have gotten scant analytical attention. This is a significant gap because women of color, who are more likely to hold these high-risk jobs, are disproportionatel…
Barriers to women’s collective identity formation in contaminated communities
Extant research emphasizes the resonance of gendered collective identities in mobilizing women’s environmental activism, particularly around motherhood and caregiving. Gaps remain, though, in our understanding of the specific barriers that can obstruct the formation of collective identity among groups of women who share environmental concerns. To interrogate this issue, we explore the case of two cancer clusters in North Carolina that many reside…
Environmental threats and activism against extractive industries: The case of gold mining in Rosia Montană, Romania
Cultivating quiescence in risk communities: Coal Ash Contamination and Cancer in Two Cities
Extant research on the management of environmental threats in risk communities highlights the control that state actors and other elites exercise over environmental risk assessments. However, less is known about the particular mechanisms of social control used by elected and other state officials to manipulate citizens’ interpretations of risk. We use the case of coal ash contamination in North Carolina to analyze strategies of control aimed at d…
Human Rights and Dissent in Hybrid Environments: The Impact of Shifting Rights Regimes
Research indicates that social movements are shaped by increased opportunities and threats, yet this work rarely examines environments of intersecting opportunity and threat. This article extends the literature on political opportunity theory by explaining how shifting rights regimes influence the political context of movements. Specifically, we analyze how dissent in Communist Czechoslovakia responded to the expansion and contraction of rights a…
Agrochemical Exposure & Environmental Illness: Legal Repression Of Latin American Banana Workers
Prior research on legal repression shows how elites use criminal law to demobilize collective challenges, yet social control efforts based in civil law have received inadequate attention. In this study, we develop the concept of elite legal framing to examine how corporations deploy “soft” forms of repression within the civil justice system. Drawing on court, government, and media documents, we analyze a series of transnational civil litigation c…
Cursed by Coal”: Climate Change and the Battle over Mining Limits in the Czech Republic
Global reliance on fossil fuels presents a significant obstacle to climate change mitigation. While numerous countries have committed to phasing out their reliance on fossil fuels, many have not followed through on their promises. We consider the Czech Republic, which is attempting to expand coal mining despite the industry’s history of environmental devastation. Drawing on the literatures regarding elite legitimation and fossil fuel industries’ …
Emerging contaminants, coerced ignorance and environmental health concerns: The case of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)
Over the past decade, there has been widespread concern about environmental contamination linked to an emerging class of compounds known as PFAS [Poly- and per-fluorinated alkyl substances]. PFAS contamination has been found in drinking water across the United States. Despite the increased interest within the scientific community, little research has been conducted on community environmental health concerns related to this emerging contaminant. T…
Energy and the Environment
Research has highlighted the relationship between production expansion and the creation of sacrifice zones in advanced capitalist economies. Yet, less attention has focused on the establishment of such regions within authoritarian, state-socialist countries. We draw theoretical and conceptual insights from treadmill of production theory and the Gramscian theory of hegemony to delineate the interaction between legitimation processes used by author…
Symbolizing Destruction: Environmental Activism, Moral Shocks, and the Coal Industry
Emotions can play an important role in the perception of grievances, yet we know little about how environmentalists strategically utilize emotions to bolster activism and garner support. Drawing on social movement and environmental sociological research, we analyze how moral shocks can be used to mobilize activists against environmentally destructive activities. We study the case of Libkovice, Czech Republic, where environmentalists battled again…
Opportunity and threat behind the Iron Curtain: The failed diffusion of human rights activism in Romania
Research has highlighted the importance of diffusion processes for the emergence and spread of collective action, yet less attention has been paid to cases where diffusion fails to lead to successful campaigns. This article analyzes an instance of failed movement diffusion to explicate how proximate episodes of contention interact with domestic configurations of opportunity and threat. The authors draw on a failed human rights campaign in communi…
Industrial pollution and acquiescence: Living With Chronic Remediation
Communities with a history of industrial production often face legacy pollution, or persistent contamination that remains long after production has ceased. Extant research informs our understanding of community mobilizing efforts around contamination, but much less is known about experience of living with chronic remediation. This research analyzes the circumstances and processes that contribute to inaction among residents living with legacy poll…
Manufacturing American Identity Among Immigrant Workers: Colorado Fuel & Iron Company at the Turn of the 20th Century
Extant research indicates that white racial framing is utilized to rationalize discrimination, but less work has examined how the white racial frame becomes filtered into institutional settings such as corporations and instilled within its programs and practices. This paper analyzes white racial framing in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company during the early twentieth century as part of its effort to Americanize and control its racially diverse work…
Petrochemical Pollution and the Suppression of Environmental Protest
While research has established how elite actors can work to protect structures that contribute to environmental harm, relatively less is known about the cultural resources that can serve elite interests at the local level. In cases of localized pollution, multiple groups have vested interests in protecting corporate legitimacy. We draw on treadmill of production theory and collective identity to analyze a case of community petrochemical contamina…
Environmental Health Advocacy and Industry Obstruction: The Case of Black Lung Disease
There has been a deadly resurgence of black lung disease, particularly in central Appalachia. The disease has a long and contentious history in the United States. During the 1960s, coal miners and their supporters successfully mobilized for recognition and treatment of the disease when it was largely eradicated. We draw from literature on environmental health movements and contested environmental illness to analyze black lung advocacy and continu…
Elite Cultural Work and Discursive Obstruction of Human Rights Activism
When challenged, states frequently respond with discursive campaigns meant to undercut the legitimacy of social movements. However, we know little about how the social and cultural status of challengers affects the state’s discursive response. We address this gap by analyzing an important historical case of human rights activism in Communist Czechoslovakia. Despite its long history of violence and repression, Czechoslovakia signed several interna…
Framing authoritarian legitimacy: Elite Cohesion in the Aftermath of Popular Rebellion
Protest activity presents a significant threat to state legitimacy in nondemocratic settings. Although authoritarian regimes rely heavily on coercion, state officials must also justify their authority to both the public and other elites. Previous work has shown how elites vilify challengers to legitimize repression, but scholars have yet to examine how state officials engage in meaning work to prevent elite divisions from forming in light of popu…
Mobilizing Grievances in an Authoritarian Setting: Threat and Emotion in the 1953 Plzeň Uprising
Material and physical threat can play a crucial role in the emergence of protest, yet few studies have explored the micro-level mechanisms that transform threat into collective action under repressive conditions. We address this gap by connecting the mobilizing power of grievances to the emotional dynamics of collective action in the context of a 1953 uprising in Communist Czechoslovakia. Following economic reforms that wiped out citizens' saving…
Risk Society and Contested Illness: The Case of Nuclear Weapons Workers
Wealth production within a "risk society" typically depends on production technologies that expose citizens to dangerous substances. Knowledge of such exposure is, more often than not, hidden from the public. Empirical analyses show that citizens' claims of illnesses caused by risky exposures are frequently contested by the institutions that select production technologies and control information: the government, corporations, and physicians. In t…
Contested Environmental Hazards and Community Conflict Over Relocation
The majority of the literature on contaminated communities indicates that environmental hazards lead to conflict and dissension. In this paper we examine the salient dimensions of conflict and factionalism in a rural Oklahoma community. The community is heavily contaminated from 80 years of commercial mining operations and was one of the first sites designated on the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund List in 1983. Despite two decades of…
Collective Identity and Memory: A Comparative Analysis of Community Response to Environmental Hazards
Research has explored the ways in which communities respond to local polluting facilities. In some cases, residents mobilize to confront corporate and state polluters, whereas in other cases residents remain quiescent in the wake of documented environmental threats. The variation in community response is often linked to demographic variables, including age, gender, education, and length of residence; yet cultural factors remain largely unexamined…
Managing the Uncertainties of Gulf War Illness: The Challenges of Living with Contested Illness
Based on observation and in-depth interviews with fifty-five respondents, we provide a detailed analysis of the Gulf War illness experience. All chronically ill people experience troublesome physical symptoms, but most reasonably expect to receive medical answers and treatment, in addition to the support of family, friends, employers, and coworkers. This research addresses a circumstance where neither sick people nor the medical establishment has…
Women's childbirth preferences and practices in the United States
Production and extrapolation of meaning in the environmental justice movement
We analyze the structural determinants of social construction processes in the environmental justice movement. We argue that initial structural conditions legitimated environmental grievances that were transformed in the 1980s into a sense of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice was produced through perceptions of: the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters; the Reagan administration's environmental deregulation; and continuing di…
Legal Repression of Protesters: The Case of Worker Revolt in Czechoslovakia
Decades of scholarship have established that dissident activity provokes state repression when it threatens elite interests and legitimacy, but there has been research attention on how state repression diffuses through institutional channels such as courts. Legal settings operate as a key site for the construction and implementation of elite discursive strategies used to undercut the legitimacy of protesters and justify repression. Social movemen…
Power, Quiescence, and Pollution: The Suppression of Environmental Grievances
The number of communities dealing with industrial pollution in the United States has increased dramatically over the past three decades. Environmental campaigns have consequentially emerged and so has research on successful mobilizing efforts. A gap remains, however, on cases where mobilization fails to materialize. In this article, we develop a typology of power’s multidimensional nature in an effort to address mechanisms by which elites prompt …
Power, Politics, and the Framing of Environmental Illness
The medical community, along with other government agencies, has created its own frame of environmental illness. This frame has been generally accepted by the American public. In this paper we discuss framing in general and the factors related to how the environmental illness frame has been constructed and maintained. We offer a brief history of the medical institution and illustrate the frame with its definitions of environmental illness. Qualit…
The enduring legacy of black lung: Environmental health and contested illness in Appalachia
Over the past twenty years there has been a deadly resurgence of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), commonly known as black lung disease. While increased prevalence of the disease is alarming, these data only capture cases where CWP has been officially recognised. We argue that many more cases of the disease are going unreported. Drawing from contested environmental illness literature, we examine issues surrounding diagnostic uncertainty and med…
Environmental Hazards and Veterans'Framing of Gulf War Illness
Military personnel and other civilians were exposed to numerous environmental hazards during their service in the Persian Gulf Crisis. Nearly a decade later well over 100,000 veterans, spouses, and other civilians are claiming illnesses related to these exposures. The U.S. government denies a connection and refuses to sanction these claims of environmental illness. Analyzing data from in-depth interviews and various documents, the author examines…
Motherhood and Opportunities for Activism Before and After the Czech Velvet Revolution
Extant social movement research emphasizes the nexus of gender and opportunity structures in a variety of contexts, yet little work has examined how gender mediates the effects of structural opportunities on activism over time. We advance the existing literature by examining environmental activism framed around motherhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Czech Republic. Our analysis draws from rich qualitative data, collected over a ten-year span, …
Corporate Frame Failure and the Erosion of Elite Legitimacy
Extant research on official frames centers on state campaigns, yet nonstate entities also utilize their own official frames. We extend the existing social movement literature by examining the unsuccessful framing efforts of a uranium mill in Cañon City, Colorado. Despite a history of environmental contamination and resultant health problems, the corporation deployed an official frame to reestablish the company's legitimacy and justify their actio…
Cycles of Repression and Tactical Innovation: The Evolution of Environmental Dissidence in Communist Czechoslovakia
Temporal analyses of social movement mobilization provide insight into how repression shapes social movement tactics and in turn, how social movements affect state response. We use the case of environmental dissent in Communist Czechoslovakia to unpack this interplay. The regime quelled activism and was grossly negligent in environmental matters, fomenting an underground environmental movement. Our data included archival documents, historical acc…
Rethinking the Scope of Environmental Injustice: Perceptions of Health Hazards in a Rural Native American Community Exposed to Carbon Black
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine perceptions of environmental health and justice among Native Americans in a rural Oklahoma community. Residents live near the Continental Carbon Company, which manufactures a rubber compound know as 'carbon black.' Ponca tribal members believe their respiratory problems and other health concerns are directly related to the black dust emanating from the facility,…
Mining for Conflict and Staking Claims: Contested Illness at the Tar Creek Superfund Site
Drawing from extensive fieldwork and document analysis, we examine environmental illness claims in Oklahoma's Tar Creek basin, one of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) premier Superfund sites. Our findings indicate that contested illness in the Tar Creek Superfund site differed from typical cases in that the links between high lead exposures and permanent neurological damage were thoroughly and unequivocally documented. But, despite the…
Framing authoritarian legitimacy: Elite Cohesion in the Aftermath of Popular Rebellion
Protest activity presents a significant threat to state legitimacy in nondemocratic settings. Although authoritarian regimes rely heavily on coercion, state officials must also justify their authority to both the public and other elites. Previous work has shown how elites vilify challengers to legitimize repression, but scholars have yet to examine how state officials engage in meaning work to prevent elite divisions from forming in light of popu…
Forty years on the fenceline: Community, memory, and chronic contamination
Residents living next to polluting industries are particularly vulnerable to toxic exposures and environmental illness. Cases of industrial contamination are shrouded in ambiguity and etiological uncertainty, making it difficult to delineate how residents understand their exposure and illness experiences. We analyze the case of Ponca City, Oklahoma to examine how residents’ collective memories and shared narratives inform their interpretations of…
Participant Narratives and Collective Identity in a Metaphysical Movement
In this article we explore social movement solidarity through an examination of narratives offered by participants in a metaphysical movement. Drawing from contemporary social movement theory, we focus on how members develop a carefully built collective identity that perpetuates movement goals and ideology. Data for this project are drawn from in-depth interviews with local psychics, participant observation in various metaphysical fairs, and docu…
Social Control and Movement Outcome: The Case of Aim
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was one of several organizations within the modern Native American movement. We analyze AIM using current variants of resource mobilization approaches, new social movement theory and the political process model to explain the organization's rapid demise. We found AIM to be characterized by its urban roots, its militant tactics, and its efforts to produce a collective identity of pan-tribalism. We conclude that, …
Environmental threats and activism against extractive industries: The case of gold mining in Rosia Montană, Romania
Frame Disputes in a Natural Resource Controversy: The Case of the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer in South-Central Oklahoma
This article examines citizen responses to the proposed sale of water from the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer in Oklahoma. Landowners claimed individual property rights as the primary justification for the sale of the water, while a citizens group opposing the sale of water based its arguments on the future viability of the resource and the cultural significance of the aquifer for the region. Based on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with key informan…
Risk and Recruitment: Patterns of Social Movement Mobilization in a Government Town
Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 80 respondents, this paper examines the importance of risks associated with activism in shaping recruitment and participation patterns in a government town. Residents have a history of involvement in civil rights activism, peace activities, and environmental organizing outside their community. However, citizens have not mobilized around local environmental problems despite a 50-year legacy o…
The Destruction of Black Wall Street: Tulsa's 1921 Riot and the Eradication of Accumulated Wealth
The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was one of the most destructive riots in American history. Prior to the riot, the Greenwood community was among the wealthiest African-American neighborhoods in the state. Residents of Greenwood had successfully developed their own business infrastructure, and by the early 1920s the neighborhood was rapidly expanding and flourishing economically. The attack by white citizens on a flourishing black neighborhood not only…
Official Frames and Corporate Environmental Pollution
This paper examines a contentious environmental dispute surrounding a decommissioned zinc smelter facility in Blackwell, Oklahoma. The environmental conflict stems from potential health effects associated with lead, cadmium, and arsenic contamination. The company that owns the former zinc smelter facility argues that they are in compliance with all environmental health and safety standards and city residents praise their ongoing remediation effor…
Social Control and Movement Outcome: The Case of Aim
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was one of several organizations within the modern Native American movement. We analyze AIM using current variants of resource mobilization approaches, new social movement theory and the political process model to explain the organization's rapid demise. We found AIM to be characterized by its urban roots, its militant tactics, and its efforts to produce a collective identity of pan-tribalism. We conclude that, …
Production and extrapolation of meaning in the environmental justice movement
We analyze the structural determinants of social construction processes in the environmental justice movement. We argue that initial structural conditions legitimated environmental grievances that were transformed in the 1980s into a sense of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice was produced through perceptions of: the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters; the Reagan administration's environmental deregulation; and continuing di…
Power, Politics, and the Framing of Environmental Illness
The medical community, along with other government agencies, has created its own frame of environmental illness. This frame has been generally accepted by the American public. In this paper we discuss framing in general and the factors related to how the environmental illness frame has been constructed and maintained. We offer a brief history of the medical institution and illustrate the frame with its definitions of environmental illness. Qualit…
Risk and Recruitment: Patterns of Social Movement Mobilization in a Government Town
Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 80 respondents, this paper examines the importance of risks associated with activism in shaping recruitment and participation patterns in a government town. Residents have a history of involvement in civil rights activism, peace activities, and environmental organizing outside their community. However, citizens have not mobilized around local environmental problems despite a 50-year legacy o…
The Role of Collective Identity in Inhibiting Mobilization: Solidarity and Suppression in Oak Ridge
On the basis of documents and in-depth interviews with 80 residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, we analyzed the lack of collective mobilization against documented environmental problems. Collective identity is a central concept in new social movement theory and is seen as a major determinant of collective action. We borrowed the concept but examined the converse. Individual activism has consistently emerged in Oak Ridge without the development of th…
Social Movement Endurance: Collective Identity and the Rastafari
In this paper we argue that a movement's longevity depends on its ability to develop and sustain a strong sense of collective identity. We investigate social movement endurance by examining the Rastafari, whose membership is comprised primarily of disadvantaged Jamaicans of African descent. While many social movements fade after a short-lived peak, the Rastafari not only has persisted, but it also has become globally important. Despite its radica…
Environmental Hazards and Veterans'Framing of Gulf War Illness
Military personnel and other civilians were exposed to numerous environmental hazards during their service in the Persian Gulf Crisis. Nearly a decade later well over 100,000 veterans, spouses, and other civilians are claiming illnesses related to these exposures. The U.S. government denies a connection and refuses to sanction these claims of environmental illness. Analyzing data from in-depth interviews and various documents, the author examines…
Cultural and Political Constraints in the Gulf War Illness Social Movement
Recent contributions to social movement theory have emphasized the importance of cultural and political opportunities in shaping movement growth and development. While most of that work focuses on how these factors facilitate social movement efforts, we examine a case in which cultural and political factors have constrained the efforts of a social movement. Analyzing data from in-depth interviews with 55 respondents, we examine the organizing eff…
Participant Narratives and Collective Identity in a Metaphysical Movement
In this article we explore social movement solidarity through an examination of narratives offered by participants in a metaphysical movement. Drawing from contemporary social movement theory, we focus on how members develop a carefully built collective identity that perpetuates movement goals and ideology. Data for this project are drawn from in-depth interviews with local psychics, participant observation in various metaphysical fairs, and docu…
Women's Work
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
Women's Work: Women's Involvement in the Gulf War Illness Movement
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
Maintaining Collective Identity in a Hostile Environment: Confronting Negative Public Perception and Factional Divisions Within the Skinhead Subculture
Previous examinations of skinhead groups have limited their attention to racist elements within the subculture. But skinheads are a far more heterogeneous group than earlier studies indicate. This diversity has put skinhead factions at odds with each other, and has challenged mainstream conceptions about the skinhead movement. In this paper, we document how traditional skinheads maintain their unique collective identity in the midst of subcultura…
Contested Environmental Hazards and Community Conflict Over Relocation
The majority of the literature on contaminated communities indicates that environmental hazards lead to conflict and dissension. In this paper we examine the salient dimensions of conflict and factionalism in a rural Oklahoma community. The community is heavily contaminated from 80 years of commercial mining operations and was one of the first sites designated on the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund List in 1983. Despite two decades of…
Managing the Uncertainties of Gulf War Illness: The Challenges of Living with Contested Illness
Based on observation and in-depth interviews with fifty-five respondents, we provide a detailed analysis of the Gulf War illness experience. All chronically ill people experience troublesome physical symptoms, but most reasonably expect to receive medical answers and treatment, in addition to the support of family, friends, employers, and coworkers. This research addresses a circumstance where neither sick people nor the medical establishment has…
Neighbors, nuisances and noxious releases: Community conflict and environmental hazards in the atomic city
Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 120 respondents, participant observation, and document analysis, we examine differential perceptions of environmental harms in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of a U.S. Government nuclear facility. The Oak Ridge Reservation has a 50-year history of nuclear weapons production and a poor environmental record. In the 1980s, a series of environmental revelations occurred and in 1989, the entire Oak Ridge Reservat…
The institutional context of Gulf War illness claims: A commentary on Cohn, Dyson and Wessely
Risk Society and Contested Illness: The Case of Nuclear Weapons Workers
Wealth production within a "risk society" typically depends on production technologies that expose citizens to dangerous substances. Knowledge of such exposure is, more often than not, hidden from the public. Empirical analyses show that citizens' claims of illnesses caused by risky exposures are frequently contested by the institutions that select production technologies and control information: the government, corporations, and physicians. In t…
Mining for Conflict and Staking Claims: Contested Illness at the Tar Creek Superfund Site
Drawing from extensive fieldwork and document analysis, we examine environmental illness claims in Oklahoma's Tar Creek basin, one of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) premier Superfund sites. Our findings indicate that contested illness in the Tar Creek Superfund site differed from typical cases in that the links between high lead exposures and permanent neurological damage were thoroughly and unequivocally documented. But, despite the…
Frame Disputes in a Natural Resource Controversy: The Case of the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer in South-Central Oklahoma
This article examines citizen responses to the proposed sale of water from the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer in Oklahoma. Landowners claimed individual property rights as the primary justification for the sale of the water, while a citizens group opposing the sale of water based its arguments on the future viability of the resource and the cultural significance of the aquifer for the region. Based on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with key informan…
Official Frames and Corporate Environmental Pollution
This paper examines a contentious environmental dispute surrounding a decommissioned zinc smelter facility in Blackwell, Oklahoma. The environmental conflict stems from potential health effects associated with lead, cadmium, and arsenic contamination. The company that owns the former zinc smelter facility argues that they are in compliance with all environmental health and safety standards and city residents praise their ongoing remediation effor…
Corporate Responses to Claims of Environmental Misconduct: The Case of Phelps Dodge and Blackwell, Oklahoma
Drawing from fieldwork and thematic content analysis, we examine corporate responses to allegations of environmental misconduct surrounding a decommissioned zinc smelter plant in Blackwell, Oklahoma. Environmental grievances center on health effects associated with exposures to lead, cadmium, and arsenic and local activists charge the responsible company, Phelps Dodge, with pandering to local city officials and state regulatory agencies. Local ci…
Rethinking the Scope of Environmental Injustice: Perceptions of Health Hazards in a Rural Native American Community Exposed to Carbon Black
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine perceptions of environmental health and justice among Native Americans in a rural Oklahoma community. Residents live near the Continental Carbon Company, which manufactures a rubber compound know as 'carbon black.' Ponca tribal members believe their respiratory problems and other health concerns are directly related to the black dust emanating from the facility,…
Wounded by Friendly Fire: Policy Palliatives and Internal Conflict in the Gulf War Illness Movement
Political movements seek influence in policy-making, but are typically marked by intra-movement conflict, which, analysts argue, reduces the achievement of social change. This article examines the effects of conflict within the Gulf War illness movement on its influencing government policy-making. Using in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analyses, the article assesses the movement's policy outcome, examines the substance of…
Cycles of Repression and Tactical Innovation: The Evolution of Environmental Dissidence in Communist Czechoslovakia
Temporal analyses of social movement mobilization provide insight into how repression shapes social movement tactics and in turn, how social movements affect state response. We use the case of environmental dissent in Communist Czechoslovakia to unpack this interplay. The regime quelled activism and was grossly negligent in environmental matters, fomenting an underground environmental movement. Our data included archival documents, historical acc…
Environmental Hazards and Community Dissension in Rural Oklahoma
Drawing from in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis we examine a contentious environmental dispute surrounding contamination from a decommissioned zinc smelter plant in rural Oklahoma. Environmental grievances center around potential health effects associated with lead, cadmium, and arsenic contamination. The company that owns the former zinc smelter facility argues that they are operating in compliance with all envir…
Political science (66 works) · Sociology (57 works) · Law (54 works) · Politics (40 works) · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Social movement (20 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Public relations (18 works)