Core Department Faculty Member
- Norah MacKendrick
- ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
- Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2011
- Email: norah.mackendrick@rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall, Room 107
- Personal Website
- Twitter: @nmackend
- Curriculum Vitae
- Google Scholar
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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.
- In the Public Eye:
- Time Magazine, “You Don’t Need to Balance Your Hormones” May 9, 2023
- MacKendrick’s editorial in The Guardian: Your fast food wrappers contain toxic chemicals. Why is that allowed?
- MacKendrick’s book Better Safe Than Sorry featured in the Washington Post, “Scientists know plastics are dangerous. Why won’t the government say so?” September 12, 2018
- Interviewed on National Public Radio, (Madison, WI). Should We Be More Worried About Chemicals in Food and Consumer Products? June 12, 2018
- Faculty Article(s):
- “Leave No Stone Unturned”: Sustainable Belonging and Desirable Futures of African American Food Imaginaries
- Like a Finely-Oiled Machine: Self-Help and the Elusive Goal of Hormone Balance
- Pandemic Politics: Political Worldviews and COVID-19 Beliefs and Practices in an Unsettled Time
- “Leave No Stone Unturned”: Sustainable Belonging and Desirable Futures of African American Food Imaginaries
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Environment and Sustainability
- Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
- Health, Population, and Biomedicine
- Politics and Social Movements
