Sabrina Mccormick
Biographic Data
| ID | 266013 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sabrina Mccormick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sabrina |
| FAMILY NAME | Mccormick |
| SIGNATURE | MCCORMICK S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9473-2186 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 463 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Joy: The key to using media to move the needle on climate change
Introduction Reaching the public and engaging them in addressing climate change could be effectively motivated by film and television. Unfortunately, to-date, there is limited understanding regarding the mechanisms by which such media motivates behavior change to address climate. In this research, we sought to investigate how media exposure can motivate climate and environmentally-conscious behaviors by assessing how emotional responses of viewer…
Landscape of litigation in the United States
The Power of Being Transported: Efficacy Beliefs, Risk Perceptions, and Political Affiliation in the Context of Climate Change
We evaluated the short-term effects of transportation on efficacy beliefs and risk perceptions after exposure to a climate change documentary. Data were collected in randomized laboratory ( N = 624) and online ( N = 1,391) experiments. Participants watched one episode of Years of Living Dangerously or a control video. Regression analyses assessed whether narrative transportation and/or political affiliation were predictive of outcomes. Transporta…
Comparing West Nile Virus and Covid-19
In 2013, we wrote a Sociology of Health & Illness article as part of a special issue on ‘Pandemics and Emerging Infectious Diseases.’ We focused on the first U.S. occurrence of West Nile Virus (WNV) – the 1999 outbreak in New York City – and used the disease as a case study in the creation of Public Health Emergencies by governments, to understand both their immediate effects and long-term consequences. At the time, West Nile Virus was the first …
The Role of Health in Climate Litigation
Objectives. To examine how the courts, which play a critical role in shaping public policy, consider public health in climate change and coal-fired power plant lawsuits. Methods. We coded US local, state, and federal court decisions relating to climate change and coal-fired power plants from 1990 to 2016 (n = 873) and qualitatively investigated 139 cases in which litigants raised issues concerning the health impacts of climate change. We also con…
The Role of Health in Urban Climate Adaptation: An Analysis of Six U.S. Cities
Climate change threatens the health of urban residents in many ways. This qualitative study aims to understand how six U.S. cities are considering health adaptation when responding to climate change; 65 semistructured interviews were conducted with salient stakeholders across six U.S. cities (Boston, Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; and Tucson, Arizona), and transcripts were analyz…
New tools for emergency managers: An Assessment of Obstacles to Use and Implementation
This paper focuses on the role of the formal response community's use of social media and crowdsourcing for emergency managers (EMs) in disaster planning, response and recovery in the United States. In-depth qualitative interviews with EMs on the Eastern seaboard at the local, state and federal level demonstrate that emergency management tools are in a state of transition-from formal, internally regulated tools for crisis response to an incorpora…
American adaptation: Social factors affecting new developments to address climate change
The Two Ways of Assessing Heat-Related Mortality and Vulnerability
Strategies to Reduce the Harmful Effects of Extreme Heat Events: A Four-City Study
Extreme heat events (EHEs) are becoming more intense, more frequent and longer lasting in the 21st century. These events can disproportionately impact the health of low-income, minority, and urban populations. To better understand heat-related intervention strategies used by four U.S. cities, we conducted 73 semi-structured interviews with government and non-governmental organization leaders representing public health, general social services, em…
Staying cool in a changing climate: Reaching vulnerable populations during heat events
The making of public health emergencies: West Nile virus in New York City
In this article we use the case of the West Nile virus (WNV) to investigate the social construction of public health emergencies (PHEs) and the subsequent changes in public health governance that they instigate. Informed by medical sociological literature on the social construction of illness, science and technology studies, and risk and disaster literature, we create a conceptual framework for connecting health and crisis. Our investigation of t…
After the Cap: Risk Assessment, Citizen Science and Disaster Recovery
I used the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to examine how crowdsourcing is used as a new form of citizen science that provides real time assessments of health-related exposures. Assessing risks of an oil spill, or disasters more generally, is a challenge complicated by the situated nature of knowledge-generation that results in differential perceptions and responses. These processes are critical in the case of the British Petroleum spill in the …
Damming the Amazon: Local Movements and Transnational Struggles Over Water
Growing contestation has arisen in the Brazilian Amazon regarding two proposed large hydroelectric dam complexes: Belo Monte and Rio Madeira. I explore the intersections between transnational and local contestation of these projects over time. I specifically focus on how scientific research and technical assessments are the field upon which these two different levels of activism operate, reflecting the importance of democracy in science and publi…
Commentary
From “Politico-Scientists” to Democratizing Science Movements: The Changing Climate of Citizens and Science
The Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) was one of the first movements to translate expert knowledge to the public. It was led by “politico-scientists” who meant to advance an ethics of science by contributing to public understanding. Since then, citizens have taken research into their own hands, using it to frame issues, challenge corporate practices, and change policy. Movement methods that respond to consistent activist concerns about scie…
Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation, and the Remaking of Knowledge
Democratizing Science Movements: A New Framework for Mobilization and Contestation
This paper develops a framework for understanding social movements that address issues related to science, technology and expert knowledge. `Democratizing science movements' contest, reframe, and engage in the production of official scientific research in order to achieve their goals. They contest the seeming objectivity and neutrality of science and seek to legitimate lay perspectives. In order to empirically explore why such movements arise and…
The Governance of Hydro-electric Dams in Brazil
This paper examines the governance of hydroelectric dam planning in Brazil with a particular focus on two factors: first, governmental institutions that aim to provide participatory mechanisms for civil society, and second, new participatory institutions created by civil society to remedy the lack of meaningful participatory measures. One example of the latter are new collaborative research projects, which have changed dam building policies and g…
The Brazilian Anti-Dam Movement: Knowledge Contestation as Communicative Action
The environmental movement has often contested and reshaped scientific knowledge to achieve its goals. However, theorists have yet to account for this social movement tactic. This research uses a case study of the anti-dam movement in Brazil, with particular reference to three instances of anti-dam activism across the country, to delineate how scientization of the state motivates environmental movements to contest science. It uses Jurgen Habermas…
A Lab of Our Own: Environmental Causation of Breast Cancer and Challenges to the Dominant Epidemiological Paradigm
There are challenges to the dominant research paradigm in breast cancer science. In the United States, science and social activism create paradigmatic shifts. Using interviews, ethnographic observations, and an extensive review of the literature, we create a three-dimensional model to situate changes in scientific controversy concerning environmental causes of breast cancer. We identify three paradigm challenges posed by activists and some scient…
Gender, embodiment, and disease: Environmental breast cancer activists' challenges to science, the biomedical model, and policy
STEPHEN ZAVESTOSKI, SABRINA McCORMICK ANDPHIL BROWNAs developed and developing societies increasingly alter their naturalenvironments by introducing chemical and other industrial by-prod-ucts, disease-based social movements aiming to link various diseasesto environmental causes are becoming more common. The burdenof scientific proof, among other factors, poses a significant challengeto these movements. We illustrate how gender identity serves bot…
Patient activism and the struggle for diagnosis: Gulf War illnesses and other medically unexplained physical symptoms in the US
Embodied health movements: New Approaches to Social Movements in Health
Social movements organised around health-related issues have been studied for almost as long as they have existed, yet social movement theory has not yet been applied to these movements. Health social movements (HSMs) are centrally organised around health, and address: (a) access to or provision of health care services; (b) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality; and/or (c) disease, illness experie…
The Personal Is Scientific, the Scientific Is Political: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement
Embodied health movements: New Approaches to Social Movements in Health
Social movements organised around health-related issues have been studied for almost as long as they have existed, yet social movement theory has not yet been applied to these movements. Health social movements (HSMs) are centrally organised around health, and address: (a) access to or provision of health care services; (b) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality; and/or (c) disease, illness experie…
Patient activism and the struggle for diagnosis: Gulf War illnesses and other medically unexplained physical symptoms in the US
The health politics of asthma: Environmental justice and collective illness experience in the United States
Democratizing Science Movements: A New Framework for Mobilization and Contestation
This paper develops a framework for understanding social movements that address issues related to science, technology and expert knowledge. `Democratizing science movements' contest, reframe, and engage in the production of official scientific research in order to achieve their goals. They contest the seeming objectivity and neutrality of science and seek to legitimate lay perspectives. In order to empirically explore why such movements arise and…
A Gulf of Difference: Disputes over Gulf War-Related Illnesses
The social discovery of Gulf War-related illnesses, like other occupational and environmental disease, is firmly rooted in ongoing disputes over causation. Pressure from veterans groups, as well as intra-governmental disputes, have driven innovative research directions and challenged the dominant epidemiological paradigm. This dominant epidemiological paradigm was originally a position that viewed stress as the primary causal factor. In the emerg…
The Personal Is Scientific, the Scientific Is Political: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement
A Lab of Our Own: Environmental Causation of Breast Cancer and Challenges to the Dominant Epidemiological Paradigm
There are challenges to the dominant research paradigm in breast cancer science. In the United States, science and social activism create paradigmatic shifts. Using interviews, ethnographic observations, and an extensive review of the literature, we create a three-dimensional model to situate changes in scientific controversy concerning environmental causes of breast cancer. We identify three paradigm challenges posed by activists and some scient…
Staying cool in a changing climate: Reaching vulnerable populations during heat events
Science, Policy, Activism, and War: Defining the Health of Gulf War Veterans
Many servicemen and women began suffering from a variety of symptoms and illnesses soon after the 1991 Gulf War. Some veterans believe that their illnesses are related to toxic exposures during their service, though scientific research has been largely unable to demonstrate any link. Disputes over the definition, etiology, and treatment of Gulf War-related illnesses (GWRIs) continue. The authors examine the roles of science, policy, and veteran a…
The Governance of Hydro-electric Dams in Brazil
This paper examines the governance of hydroelectric dam planning in Brazil with a particular focus on two factors: first, governmental institutions that aim to provide participatory mechanisms for civil society, and second, new participatory institutions created by civil society to remedy the lack of meaningful participatory measures. One example of the latter are new collaborative research projects, which have changed dam building policies and g…
Gender, embodiment, and disease: Environmental breast cancer activists' challenges to science, the biomedical model, and policy
STEPHEN ZAVESTOSKI, SABRINA McCORMICK ANDPHIL BROWNAs developed and developing societies increasingly alter their naturalenvironments by introducing chemical and other industrial by-prod-ucts, disease-based social movements aiming to link various diseasesto environmental causes are becoming more common. The burdenof scientific proof, among other factors, poses a significant challengeto these movements. We illustrate how gender identity serves bot…
Damming the Amazon: Local Movements and Transnational Struggles Over Water
Growing contestation has arisen in the Brazilian Amazon regarding two proposed large hydroelectric dam complexes: Belo Monte and Rio Madeira. I explore the intersections between transnational and local contestation of these projects over time. I specifically focus on how scientific research and technical assessments are the field upon which these two different levels of activism operate, reflecting the importance of democracy in science and publi…
Policy Issues in Environmental Health Disputes
This article compares the state of policies concerning three different diseases/conditions with putative environmental factors: asthma, breast cancer, and Gulf War-related illnesses. By comparing the state of four different types of policies--research funding, regulations, compensation/treatment, and citizen participation--the authors demonstrate the dynamic relationship between policies and health social movements. They identify four factors tha…
New tools for emergency managers: An Assessment of Obstacles to Use and Implementation
This paper focuses on the role of the formal response community's use of social media and crowdsourcing for emergency managers (EMs) in disaster planning, response and recovery in the United States. In-depth qualitative interviews with EMs on the Eastern seaboard at the local, state and federal level demonstrate that emergency management tools are in a state of transition-from formal, internally regulated tools for crisis response to an incorpora…
American adaptation: Social factors affecting new developments to address climate change
The Power of Being Transported: Efficacy Beliefs, Risk Perceptions, and Political Affiliation in the Context of Climate Change
We evaluated the short-term effects of transportation on efficacy beliefs and risk perceptions after exposure to a climate change documentary. Data were collected in randomized laboratory ( N = 624) and online ( N = 1,391) experiments. Participants watched one episode of Years of Living Dangerously or a control video. Regression analyses assessed whether narrative transportation and/or political affiliation were predictive of outcomes. Transporta…
The making of public health emergencies: West Nile virus in New York City
In this article we use the case of the West Nile virus (WNV) to investigate the social construction of public health emergencies (PHEs) and the subsequent changes in public health governance that they instigate. Informed by medical sociological literature on the social construction of illness, science and technology studies, and risk and disaster literature, we create a conceptual framework for connecting health and crisis. Our investigation of t…
After the Cap: Risk Assessment, Citizen Science and Disaster Recovery
I used the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to examine how crowdsourcing is used as a new form of citizen science that provides real time assessments of health-related exposures. Assessing risks of an oil spill, or disasters more generally, is a challenge complicated by the situated nature of knowledge-generation that results in differential perceptions and responses. These processes are critical in the case of the British Petroleum spill in the …
Print media coverage of environmental causation of breast cancer
Given the growing concern with breast cancer as a largely unexplained and common illness of our time, we would expect considerable print media coverage. An accurate portrayal of breast cancer would also include a good amount of attention to the potential environmental factors since many women with breast cancer and activists are pointing to such potential causes. Our examination of daily newspapers, newsweeklies, science periodicals, and women’s …
Print media coverage of environmental causation of breast cancer
Given the growing concern with breast cancer as a largely unexplained and common illness of our time, we would expect considerable print media coverage. An accurate portrayal of breast cancer would also include a good amount of attention to the potential environmental factors since many women with breast cancer and activists are pointing to such potential causes. Our examination of daily newspapers, newsweeklies, science periodicals, and women’s …
A Gulf of Difference: Disputes over Gulf War-Related Illnesses
The social discovery of Gulf War-related illnesses, like other occupational and environmental disease, is firmly rooted in ongoing disputes over causation. Pressure from veterans groups, as well as intra-governmental disputes, have driven innovative research directions and challenged the dominant epidemiological paradigm. This dominant epidemiological paradigm was originally a position that viewed stress as the primary causal factor. In the emerg…
Policy Issues in Environmental Health Disputes
This article compares the state of policies concerning three different diseases/conditions with putative environmental factors: asthma, breast cancer, and Gulf War-related illnesses. By comparing the state of four different types of policies--research funding, regulations, compensation/treatment, and citizen participation--the authors demonstrate the dynamic relationship between policies and health social movements. They identify four factors tha…
Science, Policy, Activism, and War: Defining the Health of Gulf War Veterans
Many servicemen and women began suffering from a variety of symptoms and illnesses soon after the 1991 Gulf War. Some veterans believe that their illnesses are related to toxic exposures during their service, though scientific research has been largely unable to demonstrate any link. Disputes over the definition, etiology, and treatment of Gulf War-related illnesses (GWRIs) continue. The authors examine the roles of science, policy, and veteran a…
The Personal Is Scientific, the Scientific Is Political: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement
The health politics of asthma: Environmental justice and collective illness experience in the United States
Gender, embodiment, and disease: Environmental breast cancer activists' challenges to science, the biomedical model, and policy
STEPHEN ZAVESTOSKI, SABRINA McCORMICK ANDPHIL BROWNAs developed and developing societies increasingly alter their naturalenvironments by introducing chemical and other industrial by-prod-ucts, disease-based social movements aiming to link various diseasesto environmental causes are becoming more common. The burdenof scientific proof, among other factors, poses a significant challengeto these movements. We illustrate how gender identity serves bot…
Patient activism and the struggle for diagnosis: Gulf War illnesses and other medically unexplained physical symptoms in the US
Embodied health movements: New Approaches to Social Movements in Health
Social movements organised around health-related issues have been studied for almost as long as they have existed, yet social movement theory has not yet been applied to these movements. Health social movements (HSMs) are centrally organised around health, and address: (a) access to or provision of health care services; (b) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality; and/or (c) disease, illness experie…
The Brazilian Anti-Dam Movement: Knowledge Contestation as Communicative Action
The environmental movement has often contested and reshaped scientific knowledge to achieve its goals. However, theorists have yet to account for this social movement tactic. This research uses a case study of the anti-dam movement in Brazil, with particular reference to three instances of anti-dam activism across the country, to delineate how scientization of the state motivates environmental movements to contest science. It uses Jurgen Habermas…
A Lab of Our Own: Environmental Causation of Breast Cancer and Challenges to the Dominant Epidemiological Paradigm
There are challenges to the dominant research paradigm in breast cancer science. In the United States, science and social activism create paradigmatic shifts. Using interviews, ethnographic observations, and an extensive review of the literature, we create a three-dimensional model to situate changes in scientific controversy concerning environmental causes of breast cancer. We identify three paradigm challenges posed by activists and some scient…
Democratizing Science Movements: A New Framework for Mobilization and Contestation
This paper develops a framework for understanding social movements that address issues related to science, technology and expert knowledge. `Democratizing science movements' contest, reframe, and engage in the production of official scientific research in order to achieve their goals. They contest the seeming objectivity and neutrality of science and seek to legitimate lay perspectives. In order to empirically explore why such movements arise and…
The Governance of Hydro-electric Dams in Brazil
This paper examines the governance of hydroelectric dam planning in Brazil with a particular focus on two factors: first, governmental institutions that aim to provide participatory mechanisms for civil society, and second, new participatory institutions created by civil society to remedy the lack of meaningful participatory measures. One example of the latter are new collaborative research projects, which have changed dam building policies and g…
From “Politico-Scientists” to Democratizing Science Movements: The Changing Climate of Citizens and Science
The Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) was one of the first movements to translate expert knowledge to the public. It was led by “politico-scientists” who meant to advance an ethics of science by contributing to public understanding. Since then, citizens have taken research into their own hands, using it to frame issues, challenge corporate practices, and change policy. Movement methods that respond to consistent activist concerns about scie…
Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation, and the Remaking of Knowledge
Damming the Amazon: Local Movements and Transnational Struggles Over Water
Growing contestation has arisen in the Brazilian Amazon regarding two proposed large hydroelectric dam complexes: Belo Monte and Rio Madeira. I explore the intersections between transnational and local contestation of these projects over time. I specifically focus on how scientific research and technical assessments are the field upon which these two different levels of activism operate, reflecting the importance of democracy in science and publi…
Commentary
After the Cap: Risk Assessment, Citizen Science and Disaster Recovery
I used the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to examine how crowdsourcing is used as a new form of citizen science that provides real time assessments of health-related exposures. Assessing risks of an oil spill, or disasters more generally, is a challenge complicated by the situated nature of knowledge-generation that results in differential perceptions and responses. These processes are critical in the case of the British Petroleum spill in the …
Staying cool in a changing climate: Reaching vulnerable populations during heat events
The making of public health emergencies: West Nile virus in New York City
In this article we use the case of the West Nile virus (WNV) to investigate the social construction of public health emergencies (PHEs) and the subsequent changes in public health governance that they instigate. Informed by medical sociological literature on the social construction of illness, science and technology studies, and risk and disaster literature, we create a conceptual framework for connecting health and crisis. Our investigation of t…
Strategies to Reduce the Harmful Effects of Extreme Heat Events: A Four-City Study
Extreme heat events (EHEs) are becoming more intense, more frequent and longer lasting in the 21st century. These events can disproportionately impact the health of low-income, minority, and urban populations. To better understand heat-related intervention strategies used by four U.S. cities, we conducted 73 semi-structured interviews with government and non-governmental organization leaders representing public health, general social services, em…
American adaptation: Social factors affecting new developments to address climate change
The Two Ways of Assessing Heat-Related Mortality and Vulnerability
New tools for emergency managers: An Assessment of Obstacles to Use and Implementation
This paper focuses on the role of the formal response community's use of social media and crowdsourcing for emergency managers (EMs) in disaster planning, response and recovery in the United States. In-depth qualitative interviews with EMs on the Eastern seaboard at the local, state and federal level demonstrate that emergency management tools are in a state of transition-from formal, internally regulated tools for crisis response to an incorpora…
The Role of Health in Urban Climate Adaptation: An Analysis of Six U.S. Cities
Climate change threatens the health of urban residents in many ways. This qualitative study aims to understand how six U.S. cities are considering health adaptation when responding to climate change; 65 semistructured interviews were conducted with salient stakeholders across six U.S. cities (Boston, Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; and Tucson, Arizona), and transcripts were analyz…
Political science (25 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Geography (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (8 works) · Climate change (7 works) · Climate Change and Health Impacts (7 works)