Disaster aid is an increasingly costly form of social spending and an often-overlooked way that welfare states manage risks related to climate change. In this talk, I reveal how disaster welfare programs exacerbate racial and socioeconomic inequalities through an institutional process of aid access.

From California to China, self-described “greening” efforts claiming to address inequality and the climate crisis proliferate. But why are such projects—undertaken in the name of ecological sustainability and climate resilience as well as quality of life—being carried out in such a wide range of places with very different histories, ecologies, and cultural repertoires for urban life?

Nothing will shape cities’ future more than carbon emissions—both the efforts to eliminate them, and the consequences of their emission. Yet urban and environmental sociologists have had little to say about urban climate politics’ successes and failures, especially concerning decarbonization. To explain climate politics’ dynamics—in cities, and elsewhere—sociology must follow the carbon into the viscera of social life, widening our analytic lens to capture more actors and mechanisms.

Pathways to climate equity and environmental justice traverse energy industry worksites. This seminar examines how the racial ideology of elites guides management decisions in worksites rife with labor and environmental hazards. Using the Brazilian sugar-ethanol industry as a case study, the talk illustrates how white industry elites utilize racial and non-racial discursive frames to rationalize the exposure of non-white workers to harmful practices.

While citizenship promises equality, it has deep entanglements with the colonial project. Sociologists have long analyzed mechanisms of citizenship inclusion through the lens of the class struggle and cultural resignification, and we have often tethered citizenship to the nation state and European modernity.

Computational procedures increasingly inform how we work, communicate, and make decisions. In this talk, I draw on interviews and ethnographic observations conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department to analyze the organizational and institutional forces shaping the use of information for social control.

In the era of both unprecedented access to information and unbridled economic inequality, what challenges do low-income communities of color face in a search for upward mobility?

Theories of culture have long relied on spatial metaphors to describe how meaning systems are internally organized. Constrained by limitations of data and visualization, prior spatial models of meaning have commonly taken the form of two-dimensional “maps” that can be easily rendered on paper.

The recent protests on police violence finds scholars and activists grappling with the continued marginalization of black women and girls in discussions on policing. My work uses in-depth interviews to examine this process through the eyes of black women from across the social class spectrum.