Melissa Aronczyk’s research examines questions at the intersection of media, politics and identity. She is the author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (Oxford, 2013) and the co-editor of Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Current research includes a project funded by the National Science Foundation on the role of strategic information and influence campaigns on public opinion and public policy in the United States. She is a faculty fellow with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Professor of Sociology. Steve’s current research explores some of the contours of a sociology of climate change – comparative/cross-national levels of public support, the required collective action by nation-states and the international community to address it, the serious social justice issues that climate change generates, and public understanding of climate engineering technologies. Additional projects include examining climate finance and development investments, both public and private in adaptation and mitigation. The levels of cooperation required to make significant reductions in greenhouse gases. He is also interested in capabilities of international organizations engaged in climate change. He is currently editing the 2^nd Edition of the Routledge Handbook on Climate Change and Society.

Other projects include articulating Karl Polanyi’s environmental sociology and sustainable institutions built upon Polanyian thinking, investigating sustainable lifestyles in the U.S. – especially around the rapid development of organic farm to table movement in Northwestern Michigan – including its economic sustainability. With local collaborators, as well as students, Steve continues his decades’ long field research in Belize, Central America, investigating the challenges to state-civil society relationships in ecological governance, and more recently on the country’s engagement with climate change - its domestic actions and international systems of support. This country-level examination helps to ground-truth his more international analysis.

His earlier research focused on the sociology of biodiversity conservation, organized international reforestation programs, and environmentalisms. Before arriving at Rutgers, Steve taught at Princeton, Michigan, Illinois, and Syracuse. He earned his graduate degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Steve is currently chairing the dissertation projects of: Robert Duffy, Maria Espinoza, and Amanda Sie.

Danielle Falzon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2022. Her research brings together insights from environmental sociology, global and transnational studies, organizations, and critical development. She also draws upon insights from the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and political ecology.

Danielle’s work uses primarily qualitative methods to examine power and inequality in decision-making about climate change. She aims to work across scales, connecting the global to the local through meso-level organizational intermediaries.

Her current research focuses in two (connected) sites: the UN climate negotiations and the field of climate adaptation work in Bangladesh. At each site she examines the relational and structural power differentials between actors and how these dynamics work for or against climate justice. Her current work at the UN climate negotiations examines obstruction in the areas of loss and damage, climate finance, and adaptation. Her work in Bangladesh elucidates the field of organizational actors involved in efforts to adapt communities to climate impacts and analyzes the implications of the norms and priorities that guide their efforts. She is also developing individual and collaborative projects on climate displacement, locally-led adaptation, and a text-based analysis of global flows of aid and climate finance.

Danielle is affiliated with the International Centre for Climate Change (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh and the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN).

 Air Quality Study

Norah MacKendrick’s research falls within the fields of environmental sociology, medical sociology, gender, food studies, science and technology studies, and consumer studies. From 2020-23 served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology. In 2023, she became co-editor of Rutgers University Press’s award-winning “Nature, Society, and Culture” book series.

MacKendrick is the author of Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics, which identifies the rise of “precautionary consumption” in the United States. She finds that chemical body burdens are the consequence of decades of regulatory failure to properly assess the health consequences of environmental chemicals. The burden of addressing this failure has fallen to women and mothers who feel responsible for protecting their children from exposure to chemicals, and do so through cooking, grocery shopping, and management of the household. The book reveals how discourses of maternal responsibility and consumer empowerment circulate within the campaigns of environmental health advocacy groups, and as well as through the retail landscape for organic foods and ‘green’ products, particularly Whole Foods Market.

Better Safe Than Sorry won the Best First Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food & Society (2019), and the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environmental Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (2020).

In her other research, MacKendrick has examined the intersections of risk, individualization, and modern motherhood, as well as the dynamics of non-toxic consumption, “foodscapes” and science activism. Her research has been published in Gender & Society, Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Social Science & Medicine, Sociological Forum, Socius, Science Advances, Journal of Consumer Culture, Food, Culture and Society, Contexts, and Gastronomica.

MacKendrick is working on several new projects. One explores the social construction of hormones as risky technologies and substances essential for realizing wellness and selfhood. Another examines air quality and heat stress under climate change. A third, with Dr. Edmée Ballif, examines the normative arguments surrounding the place of plant milks in the diets of children and adults in Switzerland and the United States.

Quan D. Mai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2018. Dr. Mai’s research and teaching interests include work & occupations, social stratification, social movements, research methods, and environmental sociology. His scholarship focuses on how a range of social relations—including employment relations, race-ethnic relations, state regulatory capacity, and social movements—combine in the economy, polity, and in urban spaces to influence processes of social stratification. His current projects explore various consequences of nonstandard employment for workers’ labor market outcomes and socioeconomic well-being.

He is a sociologist studying how work, race, and space shape various dimensions of social inequality in the labor market. His recent publications analyze the institutional drivers of work precarity in a cross-national setting. His current research examines how the experience of nonstandard employment shapes various aspects of workers’ lives, including their well-being and labor market prospects. In another related line of research, he explores the interaction between multiple media platforms, political institutions, and social movements. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Social Forces, Social Science & Medicine, Research in the Sociology of Work, Labor History, ​and other academic journals.

Karen M. O’Neill is a sociologist who studies how policies about land and water affect government power, the status of experts, and the well-being of various social groups. She has researched biodiversity protections in the urban plans of large cities around the world, local slow growth and pro-growth movements and policies in small towns, river flood control, and coastal storm vulnerability and hazard reduction. Karen has written or co-edited books on the rise of the U.S. program for river flood control and growth of government power (Duke University Press), on race and Hurricane Katrina (Rutgers University Press), and on changes in institutions in response to Hurricane Sandy (Rutgers University Press). She is a member of teams in two international competitions for coastal resilience designs, one for the New Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy, under the Rebuild by Design competition (finalist team), and the second to use the Mississippi River to replenish coastal land in Louisiana, under the Changing Course competition (one of three winning teams).

Ethan D. Schoolman is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Dr. Schoolman is an environmental sociologist whose work focuses primarily on the politics and culture of local food systems, and the implications of robust local and alternative food systems for environmental sustainability, public health, and social justice. Since coming to Rutgers, Dr. Schoolman has directed large-scale surveys of specialty crops growers in the Midwest, farmers in the Highlands region of New Jersey, and vendors at farmers markets in thirteen New Jersey counties. While working on these and other projects, Dr. Schoolman has collaborated with a number of not-for-profit groups and government agencies, including New Jersey Audubon, New Jersey Youth Corps, Elijah’s Promise, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Dr. Schoolman’s work has been published in journals spanning a range of disciplines, including Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Ecological Economics, Sociological Forum, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Sustainability Science.At Rutgers, Dr. Schoolman teaches on sustainable food systems, environmental politics, and research methods. He is on the graduate faculties in Sociology, Nutritional Sciences, and at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and he is a faculty affiliate at the New Jersey Institute of Food, Nutrition, and Health.

Professor Rachael Shwom teaches undergraduate courses in Energy and Society, Innovative Solutions to Environmental Problems, and Theory and Reasoning in Human-Environment Interactions and graduate courses in Human Dimensions of Environmental Change and the Environmental Movement. Her research interests are in environmental sociology, organizational sociology and consumption. Her research interests are in the areas of civil society organizations and societal change; how people make sense of climate change and respond; how social institutions structure environmentally significant-consumption; and models in the natural and social sciences. She is currently involved in projects exploring:how household greenhouse gas emissions can be measured and reduced, how people interpret disruptive events in an environment of organized irresponsibility and respond, the public’s preferences for energy decarbonization and impacts of survey sampling, and theorizing rapid social change and social tipping points.

Todd E. Vachon, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations (LSER) and the Director of the Labor Education Action Research Network (LEARN) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. As the Director of LEARN, Todd oversees the University’s labor education programs, including classes and workshops for workers, unions, and other organizations and public programming designed to: (a) strengthen the community at work, (b) facilitate its organization on a more democratic basis, and (c) address unjustified inequalities of power and wealth in society. 

Todd’s teaching interests include classes on capitalism and democracy; inequality and social movements to reduce inequality; and climate change, labor, and sustainability. In the LSER department, he regularly teaches U.S. Labor History, Perspectives on Labor Studies, Youth and Work, and Sustainability, Jobs and Justice. Other classes he has taught include Social Problems of American Capitalism, Race, Class and Gender, and Jobs, Work, and Globalization. Through the LEARN program, Todd runs non-credit classes on organizing, collective bargaining, shop stewarding, and more.  

Todd’s research agenda is a theoretically and empirically driven effort to understand the structural origins and consequences of inequality and the struggles of ordinary people to achieve greater equality and dignity through education, organizations, and movements. To this end, he has published widely on labor and social movements, social stratification, and the intersection of work and environmental issues in journals such as Socius, Social Science Research, Labor Studies Journal, Sociological Forum, Industrial and Economic Democracy, Global Labor Journal and the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. Todd is the co-editor, along with Tobias Schulze-Cleven of the book Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future, which makes the case for a labor studies perspective on the future of work and workers. His next book, Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice, about the emerging labor-climate movement within the U.S. labor movement, will be released in early 2023.