A Mccumber
Biographic Data
| ID | 41904 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Mccumber |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mccumber |
| SIGNATURE | MCCUMBER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0048-8048 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Structures of feeling in climate fiction
With a steady onslaught of extreme weather events and quickly surpassed temperature records, the climate crisis is increasingly moving from the realm of hypotheticals to that of lived experience. In this context, many sociologists have called for their discipline to make climate change a core agenda item. While climate change-focused sociology has certainly increased of late, a general dissatisfaction with the discipline’s treatment of the issue …
Animals as Natural Wealth: Heterogeneity and Inequality in the Valuation of Natural Wonders
The term “cultural wealth” has been used to refer to a place’s symbolic associations that might confer on it economic benefits. One form of cultural wealth is a place’s natural wonders, which might boost tourism or bring reputational prestige. While scholars have shown how Eurocentrism shapes cultural wealth’s distribution and evaluative criteria, heterogeneity in the valuation of “natural” wealth has been underexamined. Using regression analysis…
A Symbolic Hierarchy of Places: Global Inequalities in Tourism Narratives of the New York Times Travel Section
The Indoors/Outdoors Divide: Homelessness, Rat Infestation, and Spatial Management in Downtown Los Angeles
In 2019, Los Angeles, California's City Hall was reported to be infested with rats. LA's pest control contractor later drew a link between this rat problem and nearby encampments of unhoused residents. I use these connected cases of homelessness and rat control in Los Angeles to investigate the spatial and symbolic logics that guide urban social processes. Using computational and qualitative text analysis, interviews, and participant observation,…
Climate Silence in Sociology? How Elite American Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies Treat Climate Change
Climate change is among the most pressing problems of our time, yet it remains a marginal topic in sociology. This study draws on citation network analysis, qualitative coding, and computational text analysis of articles published between 2015 and 2020 in select journals in U.S. elite sociology, environmental sociology, and science and technology studies (STS) to better understand differences and similarities in how these (sub)fields approach-or …
The Bestiary in the Candy Aisle
Archaeology and anthropology treat the presence of animals in mythology and folklore as axiomatically about a culture’s ideas of nature. Sociology often assumes modernity no longer has such myths, but animal imagery abounds. In this article, the authors argue that our relationships with animals and nature are not primarily rational or scientific but formed through these images and the mythologies that come with them. The authors call these images…
Elite Environmental Aesthetics: Placing Nature in a Changing Climate
Are lakes a public good or exclusive resource? Towards value-based management for aquatic invasive species
Mask Refusal Backlash: The Politicization of Face Masks in the American Public Sphere during the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic
This research shows how face masks took on discursive political significance during the early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the United States. The authors argue that political divisions over masks cannot be understood by looking to partisan differences in mask-wearing behaviors alone. Instead, they show how the mask became a political symbol enrolled into patterns of affective polarization. This study relies on qualitative an…
“You Can’t Ignore the Rat”: Nonhuman Animals in Boundary Work
This article demonstrates how human–animal interactions are uniquely important to the negotiation of group identity and its boundaries. I use ethnographic, interview, and archival historical data to examine Alberta, Canada’s province-wide rat control program and its decades-old claim to ‘rat-free’ status. Using an approach to culture as systems of shared meaning, I investigate the significance of this institutional rat control effort and why bein…
The Wild in Fire: Human Aid to Wildlife in the Disasters of the Anthropocene
Should you help a wild rabbit fleeing a wall of flame? What is our responsibility to wildlife affected by wildfire? This paper focuses on two cases of ad hoc public aid to wildlife that occurred during California's 2017 ‘Thomas Fire’ and were subsequently popularised online. We take the discourse surrounding these cases – specifically, a viral video of a man removing a wild rabbit from the fire's flames and the widespread call to leave out bucket…
Producing the natural: Mobilities and the managed aesthetics of nature
Nature can be a nebulous, often contradictory concept that holds immense cultural and emotional weight for many. Philosophers and social scientists have frequently dissected its meaning and shared significance, especially with respect to environmental issues. This paper analyzes nature as experienced and understood in everyday life in Western society, arguing that the most salient, intuitive mode of understanding the concept is a visual–pictorial…
Building “Natural” Beauty: Drought and the Shifting Aesthetics of Nature in Santa Barbara, California
This article analyzes the tension between the built and intrinsic elements that constitute Santa Barbara, California, as a place, by investigating two related questions: How is Santa Barbarans’ sense of place impacted by citywide cultural preferences for a specific plant aesthetic? and How have recent drought conditions affected that plant aesthetic, and its population’s cultural relationship to nature and the environment? The analysis focuses pr…
Nature: Postmodern narrative, place, and nature in Santa Barbara, CA
We conducted a mixed methods content analysis of posts on the social media network Instagram to investigate the role ideas of ‘nature’ play in the construction of place in Santa Barbara, California. Whereas narrative is instrumental to the construction of place, Instagram constitutes a paradigmatically postmodern form of narrative that has fundamentally changed both the process of place-making, and the types of places that result. Both these phen…
Mask Refusal Backlash: The Politicization of Face Masks in the American Public Sphere during the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic
This research shows how face masks took on discursive political significance during the early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the United States. The authors argue that political divisions over masks cannot be understood by looking to partisan differences in mask-wearing behaviors alone. Instead, they show how the mask became a political symbol enrolled into patterns of affective polarization. This study relies on qualitative an…
Climate Silence in Sociology? How Elite American Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies Treat Climate Change
Climate change is among the most pressing problems of our time, yet it remains a marginal topic in sociology. This study draws on citation network analysis, qualitative coding, and computational text analysis of articles published between 2015 and 2020 in select journals in U.S. elite sociology, environmental sociology, and science and technology studies (STS) to better understand differences and similarities in how these (sub)fields approach-or …
Elite Environmental Aesthetics: Placing Nature in a Changing Climate
The Indoors/Outdoors Divide: Homelessness, Rat Infestation, and Spatial Management in Downtown Los Angeles
In 2019, Los Angeles, California's City Hall was reported to be infested with rats. LA's pest control contractor later drew a link between this rat problem and nearby encampments of unhoused residents. I use these connected cases of homelessness and rat control in Los Angeles to investigate the spatial and symbolic logics that guide urban social processes. Using computational and qualitative text analysis, interviews, and participant observation,…
The Wild in Fire: Human Aid to Wildlife in the Disasters of the Anthropocene
Should you help a wild rabbit fleeing a wall of flame? What is our responsibility to wildlife affected by wildfire? This paper focuses on two cases of ad hoc public aid to wildlife that occurred during California's 2017 ‘Thomas Fire’ and were subsequently popularised online. We take the discourse surrounding these cases – specifically, a viral video of a man removing a wild rabbit from the fire's flames and the widespread call to leave out bucket…
Producing the natural: Mobilities and the managed aesthetics of nature
Nature can be a nebulous, often contradictory concept that holds immense cultural and emotional weight for many. Philosophers and social scientists have frequently dissected its meaning and shared significance, especially with respect to environmental issues. This paper analyzes nature as experienced and understood in everyday life in Western society, arguing that the most salient, intuitive mode of understanding the concept is a visual–pictorial…
Building “Natural” Beauty: Drought and the Shifting Aesthetics of Nature in Santa Barbara, California
This article analyzes the tension between the built and intrinsic elements that constitute Santa Barbara, California, as a place, by investigating two related questions: How is Santa Barbarans’ sense of place impacted by citywide cultural preferences for a specific plant aesthetic? and How have recent drought conditions affected that plant aesthetic, and its population’s cultural relationship to nature and the environment? The analysis focuses pr…
Nature: Postmodern narrative, place, and nature in Santa Barbara, CA
We conducted a mixed methods content analysis of posts on the social media network Instagram to investigate the role ideas of ‘nature’ play in the construction of place in Santa Barbara, California. Whereas narrative is instrumental to the construction of place, Instagram constitutes a paradigmatically postmodern form of narrative that has fundamentally changed both the process of place-making, and the types of places that result. Both these phen…
Producing the natural: Mobilities and the managed aesthetics of nature
Nature can be a nebulous, often contradictory concept that holds immense cultural and emotional weight for many. Philosophers and social scientists have frequently dissected its meaning and shared significance, especially with respect to environmental issues. This paper analyzes nature as experienced and understood in everyday life in Western society, arguing that the most salient, intuitive mode of understanding the concept is a visual–pictorial…
The Wild in Fire: Human Aid to Wildlife in the Disasters of the Anthropocene
Should you help a wild rabbit fleeing a wall of flame? What is our responsibility to wildlife affected by wildfire? This paper focuses on two cases of ad hoc public aid to wildlife that occurred during California's 2017 ‘Thomas Fire’ and were subsequently popularised online. We take the discourse surrounding these cases – specifically, a viral video of a man removing a wild rabbit from the fire's flames and the widespread call to leave out bucket…
“You Can’t Ignore the Rat”: Nonhuman Animals in Boundary Work
This article demonstrates how human–animal interactions are uniquely important to the negotiation of group identity and its boundaries. I use ethnographic, interview, and archival historical data to examine Alberta, Canada’s province-wide rat control program and its decades-old claim to ‘rat-free’ status. Using an approach to culture as systems of shared meaning, I investigate the significance of this institutional rat control effort and why bein…
The Bestiary in the Candy Aisle
Archaeology and anthropology treat the presence of animals in mythology and folklore as axiomatically about a culture’s ideas of nature. Sociology often assumes modernity no longer has such myths, but animal imagery abounds. In this article, the authors argue that our relationships with animals and nature are not primarily rational or scientific but formed through these images and the mythologies that come with them. The authors call these images…
Elite Environmental Aesthetics: Placing Nature in a Changing Climate
Are lakes a public good or exclusive resource? Towards value-based management for aquatic invasive species
Mask Refusal Backlash: The Politicization of Face Masks in the American Public Sphere during the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic
This research shows how face masks took on discursive political significance during the early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the United States. The authors argue that political divisions over masks cannot be understood by looking to partisan differences in mask-wearing behaviors alone. Instead, they show how the mask became a political symbol enrolled into patterns of affective polarization. This study relies on qualitative an…
The Indoors/Outdoors Divide: Homelessness, Rat Infestation, and Spatial Management in Downtown Los Angeles
In 2019, Los Angeles, California's City Hall was reported to be infested with rats. LA's pest control contractor later drew a link between this rat problem and nearby encampments of unhoused residents. I use these connected cases of homelessness and rat control in Los Angeles to investigate the spatial and symbolic logics that guide urban social processes. Using computational and qualitative text analysis, interviews, and participant observation,…
Climate Silence in Sociology? How Elite American Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies Treat Climate Change
Climate change is among the most pressing problems of our time, yet it remains a marginal topic in sociology. This study draws on citation network analysis, qualitative coding, and computational text analysis of articles published between 2015 and 2020 in select journals in U.S. elite sociology, environmental sociology, and science and technology studies (STS) to better understand differences and similarities in how these (sub)fields approach-or …
A Symbolic Hierarchy of Places: Global Inequalities in Tourism Narratives of the New York Times Travel Section
Structures of feeling in climate fiction
With a steady onslaught of extreme weather events and quickly surpassed temperature records, the climate crisis is increasingly moving from the realm of hypotheticals to that of lived experience. In this context, many sociologists have called for their discipline to make climate change a core agenda item. While climate change-focused sociology has certainly increased of late, a general dissatisfaction with the discipline’s treatment of the issue …
Animals as Natural Wealth: Heterogeneity and Inequality in the Valuation of Natural Wonders
The term “cultural wealth” has been used to refer to a place’s symbolic associations that might confer on it economic benefits. One form of cultural wealth is a place’s natural wonders, which might boost tourism or bring reputational prestige. While scholars have shown how Eurocentrism shapes cultural wealth’s distribution and evaluative criteria, heterogeneity in the valuation of “natural” wealth has been underexamined. Using regression analysis…
Sociology (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 works) · Social science (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Environmental ethics (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works)