SSSP Division of Environment and Technology Fall 2016 Newsletter Newsletter Contents 1 Message from the Chair 2 Student Paper Competition Announcement 3 Challenges and Opportunities for Social Science in Inter/Transdisciplinary Environmental Studies 7 Call for Editor(s) of Social Problems 10 Getting Toward Climate Justice in the Classroom 13 2017 SSSP AM Call for Papers 14 E&T Annual Meeting Sessions 17 Book and Program Announcements Message from the Chair Dear E&T section members, Thanks to all who participated in this year’s annual meeting, which was a resounding success for the organization and our section. I enjoyed attending many intriguing sessions on diverse topics related to social problems surrounding the environment. The globalization theme shaped many of our division-sponsored sessions and we look forward to continuing this trend in Montreal in 2017. The theme for next year’s annual meeting, “Narratives in the World of Social Problems: Power, Resistance, Transformation,” is a powerful thematic for interrogating social and environmental problems. We have organized a full slate of exciting panels, dialogues, and thematic sessions for these meetings. Please see page 14 of the newsletter for more information. Thanks to those who have volunteered to serve as session organizers and those who proposed session ideas at the business meeting in Seattle. Please enjoy the contents of the newsletter, including a collaborative report on our 2016 session on doing interdisciplinary social/environmental research, a list of people on the job market, and information on new publications and upcoming conferences. I also want to call your attention to an exciting announcement for an editorial search for our journal, Social Problems, that I would encourage our members to consider. Finally, we have a call for submissions to the graduate student paper award as detailed at the bottom of this page. I am deeply indebted to our magnificent newsletter editors, Lisa East and Clare Cannon, whose tireless inputs made this newsletter possible. Thank you!! I hope you share my enthusiasm for the planned sessions. We look forward to receiving your submissions in early 2017. Take care, Laura ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION Deadline: 1/31/17 The Environment and Technology Division is pleased to announce its 2016 Brent K. Marshall Graduate Student Paper Award. This award honors the late Brent Marshall’s (1965-2008) personal and professional commitment to the Division and encouragement of student engagement in academic scholarship and research. Papers will be considered in the areas of environmental sociology, including, but not limited to political economy of the environment, global environmental issues, social movements and the environment, technology and society, natural disasters and society, and risk perception. The winner of the Brent K. Marshall Graduate Student Paper Award will receive a plaque, a complimentary student membership ($30), conference registration ($60), and a cash award ($100). To be eligible, the paper must meet the following criteria: 1) the paper must have been written in 2016; 2) the paper must be authored by one or more students and not co-authored by faculty or a colleague who is not a student; 3) manuscripts should be limited to fewer than 10,000 words (inclusive of notes, references, and tables) and 4) the paper must not be published or accepted for publication. Students should send their submissions to each member of the award committee Erin Robinson (robinso5@canisius.edu), Nels Paulson (paulsonne@uwstout.edu), and Victor Perez (victorp@udel.edu). Please note that students may submit to only one Division for a student paper award. Authors should ensure that they receive a confirmation of receipt for their submission. In order to be considered for the Brent K. Marshall Graduate Student Paper Award, applicants are required to submit their papers through the Annual Meeting Call for Papers. If you have any questions or concerns please contact Laura McKinney (lauramc@tulane.edu). Challenges and Opportunities for Social Science in Inter/Transdisciplinary Environmental Studies Introduction Interdisciplinary research in environmental science continues to expand in academia and elsewhere. While social scientists have contributed significantly to the understanding of the diverse social, economic, and psychological impacts of environmental problems on community members, the process of environmental hazard discovery, and the roles of affected residents in contaminated communities2, social science all too often still plays a peripheral role in interdisciplinary research. Scholars suggest that this is partly due to the lack of theoretical and conceptual tools to include the biophysical world in their analyses, resulting in social and environmental research that is done in parallel, but not necessarily in a truly interdisciplinary fashion.3 We can reflect upon the inclusion and function of social science in environmental studies by creating platforms to share experiences with colleagues engaged in this work. At this year’s SSSP meeting in Seattle, Session 26 was a Critical Dialogue that allowed several social scientists to discuss their experiences in interdisciplinary environmental studies, and consisted of panelists from a range of substantive interests, institutions, and stages in their careers. Here, we provide a brief overview of the results from the Dialogue and offer contributions from some of the individual participants. We hope that this Dialogue helps to inform other sociologists and social scientists involved in interdisciplinary environmental research, and encourage the continuation of this discussion in SSSP. “We Need a Social Scientist Right Now!”4 The central concern among many of the panelists was the way social science methods and outcomes have been integrated into projects, and each offered penetrating examinations of their experiences. For a variety of reasons, including federal and local funding mechanisms and opportunities, the structure of research networks across disciplines in academia, and the necessary infrastructure to successfully mount studies using complex methodologies like community-based participatory research (CBPR) or policy ethnography, social scientists are often not the primary catalyst for interdisciplinary environmental science projects. As such, many are treated as “add-ons” to already established projects by engineers, geologists, and others, whose recent funding sources may require some social science dimension, but as a part of research projects that have been directed by natural science questions from the beginning. The most successful projects are those that have social scientists help frame and develop the overall research projects from very early on, fully integrating their diverse methodologies with the natural sciences and offering more complete ways to fully realize the benefits of involving community perspectives to shape scientific questions. Further, this type of early integration and project building across the sciences ensures that the work will be most useful to the community’s needs. Individual Contributions Below we have contributions from several of the individual participants, including Nels Paulson, Erin Robinson, Victor Perez, and Tamara Mix, all of which we believe will be food for thought and useful experience for SSSP readers working on interdisciplinary research projects. We close with a few summary points from our collective experiences. Nels Paulson: Associate Professor of Sociology; Director, Social Science Research Center; Director, LAKES REU; University of Wisconsin-Stout I co-direct, with economist Chris Ferguson, a National Science Foundation sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that focuses on phosphorus pollution called the LAKES (Linking Applied Knowledge in Environmental Sustainability) REU (www.uwstout.edu/lakes). This is an interdisciplinary project that involves research from sociology, economics, biology, geology, anthropology, geography, and mathematics. Phosphorus pollution is a problem for two reasons: 1) it comes largely from non-point run-off from dispersed land use (mainly agricultural) that is more difficult to manage than point source pollution, and 2) it leads to toxic cyanobacteria (otherwise known as blue-green algae bloom) in our rivers and lakes. The University of Wisconsin-Stout resides on two impoundments in the Red Cedar River Basin in West Central Wisconsin and are two of the most eutrophic lakes in the state. We also are a university that places emphasis on teaching, with most of us teaching eight courses or more a year. We realized the interdisciplinary potential of this research soon after my arrival in 2009, at a time where there was not much social science research occurring, or even really expected, at UW-Stout. This flexibility in expectations, with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring students, allowed us to develop a research agenda that was driven first and foremost by social science with an emphasis on evaluating the community capacity of the watershed to address this difficult socio-environmental problem. We have since highlighted our research in non-academic settings, focusing on engaging the community as we studied it. While there was natural science conducted in an exemplary manner alongside the social science, the utility of junior faculty in the social sciences setting the agenda maintained a relatively new way of doing watershed assessment in the region, a new way that brought excitement from many people who have worked on this issue for decades. The consequence was tremendous increase in community engagement in pollution abatement efforts, to the level where the rest of the state, including the DNR, County Land Conservation Divisions, and US Army Corps of Engineers, has taken notice and approached us about expanding our research endeavors with additional funding. While many had written off the watershed as hopeless, now the LAKES research has helped drive the EPA approved TMDL implementation plan and, I’m told, restored the hope and enthusiasm in pursuing multi-faceted solutions both on land and in the waterways. These successes have bumped up against a very real challenge, however, as we are now realizing this overall project is not sustainable for us as researchers, nor is it something we can expand on with research on other watersheds ourselves. We have maintained and expanded the LAKES research project without any meaningful course releases. In addition, most of our mentors are seen as important leaders on campus and are now committed to other agendas ranging from program directors to department chairs to Honors College director (the case for my Co-PI). These are mounting expectations on exceptional faculty as we have seen drastic cuts to resources by political leaders in Wisconsin for the UW system (as many of you have probably seen in the news). Some of us struggle to even find time to spend with our families. These are not unique challenges, as I learned from the other panelists in the Critical Dialogue on this topic at SSSP. Finding ways forward will mean, first and foremost, gaining more state resources when they are at an all-time low. So while this project is remarkably successful because of how much social science framed and developed the overall interdisciplinary project, we do share concerns with other researchers in this country for making such meaningful interdisciplinary work sustainable and efficacious in the long term. Erin E. Robinson: Associate Professor of Sociology; Director Environmental Studies; Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Criminal Justice at Canisius College My involvement on a three-year interdisciplinary National Science Foundation grant entitled, Advancing groundwater restoration through qualitative analysis: What participants and stakeholders care about and why it matters, is the topic of my discussion. Team members include faculty researchers from sociology, philosophy, history, and environmental engineering. Understanding the role of each discipline in answering this question becomes imperative. Additionally, the qualitative research process of in-depth interviewing and thematic analysis required each member to learn, process, and understand the nuances of the research method in order to fully address the research question. This included measures for interviewing and analytical inter-coder reliability, as well as consistency in the analysis and writing process. Faced with the technical question of what forms of groundwater remediation are most used and most effective, team members also asked questions about the role of values and social relationships when making such decisions concerning the environmental groundwater contamination. In most cases, such contaminated sites are either left to natural attenuation or long-term management practices—neither of which can claim to be completely successful in remediating hazards. This project then addresses different disciplinary foci in order to more fully address this issue. From the sociological framework, the role of community values and environmental health and justice perspectives frame the questions, and evaluating the role of these issues in the overall outcome of the research has become a central focus of this grant work. That said, sociological issues tend to be secondary to the economic and engineering solutions proposed by many of those interviewed. To engage that outcome through the discourse of both team members and interviewees in the course of both the proposal and research stage of this grant is vital. Towards this end, the environmental sociological perspective lends itself to serve as a pulse point to continually integrate the human ecological perspective when considering decisions over environmental remediation practices. My role as a sociologist on our interdisciplinary team continually reinforced the focus on community engagement practices among regulators and community members. Our grant work exemplifies the need for social science perspectives to be integrated into natural science practices that fail to consider social interaction and human engagement when discussing the extent of environmental issues facing our society. Victor W. Perez: Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice; Faculty Affiliate/Investigator at the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN) My contribution to the Critical Dialogue at SSSP this year emanated from my work as a sociologist on a “coupled natural and human systems” National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project examining how sea level rise may interact with legacy soil contamination (e.g., arsenic, lead, chromium). In short, there is a paucity of literature on how increased and repeated water inundation may interact with contaminated soil, and so several basic science questions were raised by my chemistry and hydrology colleagues, including: 1) will contaminants become more or less mobile with repeated water inundation; and 2) how might this impact adjacent environmental habitats and, directly or indirectly, human health? Areas ripe for this potential interaction of projected sea level rise and legacy contaminants include those with histories of industry, including South Wilmington, DE. This area in particular has a long, complex history of land and groundwater use by numerous types of polluting industries, many of which left long-lasting contaminants in the environment, complicating the use of that land. Also known as brownfields, South Wilmington, like many other areas with pockets of legacy contaminated soil, are also areas of concentrated social disadvantage due to the impacts of de-industrialization.5 Thus, the interest of my natural science colleagues was intimately embedded in environmental justice, and my task was to facilitate community engagement and involvement in studying the knowledge and concern of local contamination and pollution, flooding, and the potential for sea level rise to interact with existing pollution. Our work together has been very illuminating and provides some useful experiences for those involved in interdisciplinary environmental studies for several reasons, but I will focus only on two here. First, our experiences speak to the challenges of tying the pace of natural science work to disseminating important, yet highly complex, information to the community about the potential for the interaction of soil contamination and sea level rise (a key role for sociologists in the community). My colleagues’ laboratory experiments on how arsenic-laden soil interacts with water take considerable time, and of course would need to be replicated by others before their established utility and validity. As a sociologist, one of my first tasks, in addition to creating a baseline for knowledge and concern for sea level rise and pollution in the area, was to begin informing the community of this potential interaction of long-term climate change impacts with existing legacy contamination. A chief principle guiding this is precaution, which suggests sharing information – even about long term uncertainties – as fully as possible with the community. This is extremely challenging for my role on the interdisciplinary work because I need to somehow couch complex, uncertain scientific information in a way that is informative to the community and can help guide informed engagement with these problems, but without potentially overstating the impacts. In this way, the pace of research in our respective disciplines makes for complicated decisions about how to move forward, as a group, in interdisciplinary research and fulfilling our respective roles. Waiting for the natural science to become firmly established may complicate matters if, ironically, the community will deal with these issues in even more profound ways the longer that we wait to begin remediation and adaptation work. The lesson here is that interdisciplinary collaborators must be able to see how the timing and pace of their work interact in ways that make for complications in community engagement, and how they can plan for these complexities ahead of time. As noted, the communities ripe for asking questions about how legacy environmental problems will be exacerbated by climate change are often socially disadvantaged. In this way, my natural science colleagues had no choice but to at least acknowledge the reframing of their scientific questions along the social structural inequalities that produced their scientific interest. In other words, they had no choice but to see how their basic science questions are most relevant to the communities that have suffered the strongest impacts of deindustrialization and contamination, and thus their work and research findings are especially salient to addressing legacies of social injustice. Additionally, their work does not necessarily catalyze the mobilization to clean up brownfields and make communities more resilient to climate change. Brownfield revitalization and climate change adaption, at least in part, are being driven by economic incentives for redevelopment, which necessarily reframes all of our work by situating it in an arena of economic revitalization and potential displacement. At this point, my efforts are now also enmeshed in the arena of equitable redevelopment, which my colleagues may or may not see as necessarily important to their basic science questions, even with the increased visibility of the salience of their work in disadvantaged communities. The lesson here is that researchers on interdisciplinary environmental science teams may evolve in divergent or even incompatible ways, at least different than they began, and that they will all need to consider how this can impact the cumulative outcomes of the research. Tamara L. Mix: Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University As environmental sociologists working in diverse research areas who make use of community engaged approaches, we have experienced a wide variety of interdisciplinary research partnerships. Some have been powerful and productive. Others have operated in fits and starts, frustrating for all parties involved. With the rise in requirements to secure interdisciplinary grant funding and engage across departments, requests for quick turnaround interdisciplinary alliances have become more common. “We need a Social Scientist right now!” stated in panic across phone lines and in e-mail messages is not something unheard of for social scientists working at the intersection of Sociology and the environment. These calls come with little notice before a large grant proposal or project outline is due. Working in this way is not ideal for long term partnerships, strong research, or effective grant applications. Given these experiences, we share 5 important aspects we have learned about how to be successful in interdisciplinary work: 1. Interdisciplinary work requires time and planning. Search for your research partners early and often and be sure to have time to build strong research designs – keeping your deadlines in mind. 2. Interdisciplinary work requires disciplinary knowledge. It seems that everyone knows how to do social science, while other disciplines paint themselves as being specialized. Take the time to learn about the disciplines and focus areas of your collaborators. “When researchers fail to understand and recognize the principles and assumptions that are embedded in their disciplines, it can compromise the integrity and validity of their research design. If they fail to understand the principles and assumptions of other disciplines, it can limit (or worse, distort) their interpretation of the research outcomes.”6 Take time to learn and talk about the perspectives and expertise each person brings to the table. 3. Clearly articulate your role – and what you can offer. Be clear about your knowledge base and abilities – and be able to offer a rationale for your assessments. 4. Know your needs within the context of those of your collaborators. Be aware of your role within the larger project, embed the social science aspects well and articulate and establish what you need to get the research done. 5. Practice patience. Working across disciplines requires patience and conversation. Patience is a much easier goal to achieve when the first 4 items I discussed are addressed. Interdisciplinary work is hard – patience can help get you through it. Conclusion As we continue to pursue ways to make academic research immediately useful to solving our local and global environmental problems, lessons from this panel are very relevant and meaningful to interdisciplinary projects. We encourage the continued expansion of interdisciplinary research, creating partnerships that necessitate dialogues across disciplinary boundaries,7 but doing so must consider prioritizing social science integration early in project development for such work to be most impactful. A crucial element of this is encouraging natural scientists to think more about how they can integrate their methods into social science-driven projects, where sociologists do not need to figure out how to do social science in an established natural science project, but where natural scientists can ask their questions in ways tied directly to the structural inequalities that produce differential impacts of environmental hazards across communities. This insight extends to the structure of funding that often finds natural science projects scrambling for a social science contribution, which can more often than not lead to a less-than-fully realized social science outcome. As a social scientist on an interdisciplinary team, one must consider their involvement carefully, especially if they have not been involved since the genesis of the research project. Further, we find from our experiences that interdisciplinary teams must think about how their work can be sustainable in the communities where it takes place, beyond the end of their formal research project. It is clear from the panelists’ experiences how much involvement the social scientist must have to be effective in their work, having to spend a considerable amount of time in the community during and after the work is completed to ensure the greatest benefit. Many of these challenges come from the difficulty of social scientists working alone on interdisciplinary projects, and the challenges of creating the necessary infrastructure of locals, other academics, non-profit organizations, as well as state and federal collaborators to most fully effectuate meaningful social science projects. The natural scientists need to also consider how to be a consistent presence in the communities where their work is most salient. Projects with overt participatory action initiatives are crucial, as integrating communities in research that addresses their environmental issues is paramount to their full and equitable resolution. These types of projects have the most immediate pay-off in terms of their research being applied to areas of concern regarding water pollution, mining, or other issues classically tackled by environmental studies, but are tremendous tasks that the social scientist on the team is often left alone to figure out. In time, we hope to see all of the respective scientists on interdisciplinary environmental research teams fully involved within and across their traditional boundaries. 1 For the purposes of this column, the term ‘interdisciplinary’ will be used to reflect a similar meaning as ‘transdisciplinary.’ 2 Hoover, Elizabeth, Mia Renauld, Michael R. Edelstein, and Phil Brown. 2015. “Social Science Collaboration with Environmental Health.” Environmental Health Perspectives 123(111):1100-1106. 3 Stuart, Diana. 2016. “Crossing the ‘Great Divide’ in Practice: Theoretical Approaches for Sociology in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research.” Environmental Sociology 2(2):118-131. 4 Title of Critical Dialogue session from Dr. Tamara L. Mix. 5 Lee, Sangyun and Paul Mohai. 2012. “Environmental Justice Implications of Brownfield Redevelopment in the United States.” Society and Natural Resources 25(6):602-609. 6 Sievanen, Leila, Lisa M. Campbell, and Heather M. Leslie. 2012. "Challenges to Interdisciplinary Research in Ecosystem‐Based Management." Conservation Biology 26(2): 315-323. 7 Noted by panelist Mia Renauld. Getting Toward Climate Justice in the Classroom John Foran, University of California – Santa Barbara “Climate justice” has many definitions. My teaching and scholarship center around enabling meaningful action and empowerment vis-à-vis the looming catastrophe of climate change, including fighting for the most progressive possible global climate treaty, building the strongest possible global climate/social justice movements, and through both of these channels the contributing to the creation of a low-carbon, sustainable, equitable, and deeply democratic future. I believe that if we are to inhabit a livable world in coming years, the climate justice movement must become the biggest social movement the world has ever seen. Enabling and nurturing our students’ engagement with the existential challenge and “wicked” problem of climate change should be a paramount goal of our work – it is in their hands we are placing the future of the planet. Teachers are not born. We learn to teach. This is the story of how I learned to teach. I’ve taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1989 and in that time gone from a newly minted Ph.D. to the top of the professor scale. It took me about five years to learn that the lecture was not the best way to teach, and it’s taken over twenty more years of continuous practice and reflection to do my best teaching, with hopefully more and better to come. From that early eureka moment it was but a short step to making my classes primarily interactive, starting with putting my neatly written lectures into the course reader where students could really take their time with them and freeing up all that class time for more meaningful discussions of many kinds. This came about because I had the opportunity to be involved with a Pew Faculty Teaching project on the case method of learning at Harvard in 1994, and soon was working this innovative pedagogy into my classes, which have grown in recent years to average 80-150 students in size. The case method is a student-centered, highly interactive pedagogy which changes the classroom process into a collective search for an analysis and/or solution to a specific problem based on a “case” – a text that provides information about a situation, without analyzing it. The job of the students, with the professor, is to fashion solutions to the problem through a process of dialogue. The goals of the method include the development of critical thinking skills, learning through decision making and role playing situations, developing confidence in defining, confronting, analyzing, and solving problems through interactive discussions, and exercising and developing skills in public speaking and group problem solving. I believe the case method can play a constructive role in creating a more democratic culture, in which citizens are prepared to consider and debate various alternatives to their problems. I have tried to nurture and develop this pedagogy by introducing it into the social sciences. In the late 1990s, ten graduate students and I wrote cases for classroom use, posted for general use on a website at UCSB, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/projects/casemethod/. One of my projects for the next couple of years is to do a website of cases on climate and environmental justice [ETS section members, take note, and please contact me if you are interested!]. Learning is also about doing. So my students in Sociology 108G: Methods and Research in Global and International Sociology, learn methods and apply them in a group project on topics they choose (in which environment, social movements, and inequality are the three broad areas to choose from). These research papers often run to 50 pages and involve formal fifteen-minute group presentations in the last two weeks of class, just like at an academic association meeting. These projects are uniformly exciting and give the students a capstone experience of doing sociology. They learn how to effectively present their work (and they do so creatively and with all the technology at their disposal) to an audience. And they see the value of collaborative work when the results are exponentially better than anyone could have achieved on their own. Those who start out dreading group projects typically come around to valuing them, and all take this experience out with them into the world after UCSB. Learning is not about taking tests. I’ve never used a bluebook, a multiple choice test, or a short answer quiz. All my students’ papers (there are always at least 15-20 pages of writing in my classes, of various kinds) are written at home, with all materials available, and brightly polished before handing in. Well-written, original arguments, solidly documented, are the norm. Students usually have a choice of assignments, and can schedule much of their own writing over the course of a quarter. This empowers them to take charge of their evaluation process, and it yields much better papers for my TAs and me to read and offer our comments on, including writing corrections and advice for improvement on their next paper. In sociology, the subject matter is the world. Tongue only partly in cheek, my students are treated to this definition of sociology on the first day of class: “Sociology is … the study of everything!” So we study big issues and raise hard questions: how are societies structured, and how do they change? Can revolutions and other movements for radical social change transform the world for the better? Are there ways for a poor country to provide for its citizens to the living standards of a rich country? (the answer is yes). What would a binding, just, and ambitious global climate treaty look like, and how could it be negotiated at a U.N. climate summit? What should the diverse movements and organizations in the climate justice movement do in order to be more effective, on local, national, and global scales? What kind of world would you like to live in in 2050, and how would we get there? Two collaborative and rather intensive techniques for getting at these questions include role play and the art form known as pechakucha. The most extensive role-play I have done is in my course, “Earth in Crisis,” where students play out the attempt to negotiate a global climate treaty. For the past four falls terms, we have devoted two full weeks to this (the same length of time a UN climate summit lasts), with teams of three playing key countries in the negotiations or social movement/civil society groups who attend as observers and sometimes trouble-makers. While the countries engage in detailed negotiations, the civil society groups plan demonstrations and other actions designed to bring pressure on the negotiators. Things get even more interesting when in the two weeks after we finish, I attend the actual summit we have been role-playing, and Skype back with the class about what is happening there. Students can then compare their effort with the actual outcome in a final paper. Guess whose negotiations always seem to turn out better? The pecha kucha [http://www.pechakucha.org/] is a story-telling art form in which the narrator gets to show twenty slides for twenty seconds each while telling the story. This past spring I used it in place of the role play, assigning groups of five students to develop a pecha kucha on themes relevant to the two classes – “Climate Justice” and “The World in 2050: Sustainable Development and Its Alternatives.” We devoted the last two weeks of each class to these presentations, which could either be made live or presented as a video. To help the students understand both what the genre was and to give them an idea of how to do this in a masterful way, I showed them the pecha kucha, “Not Yet the End of the World,” made by former TA and now postdoc Summer Gray, which I recommend to anyone interested in this story telling format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8dTFgRAjGA In all of my academic and community work and interactions I aim to nurture and contribute to an authentic culture of inclusivity that seeks and prizes diversity of experience, belief, and thought. For me, teaching and learning are a never-ending, ever challenging, journey of discovery – of the world and of ourselves – usually enjoyable, often emotional, full of hope and humor, and sometimes, tears, but always a joint creation. May your own teaching and other adventures bend the arc of social justice toward the world we dream of… * * * Please feel free to follow up on anything mentioned here that you are interested in knowing more about or anything you’d like to share with me by e-mailing John Foran at foran@soc.ucsb.edu The Climate Justice Project Launched in August 2013, this began as a group of eight UCSB-affiliated individuals, including three undergraduates and two graduate students. Seven of us attended the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, in 2013, leading to an e-book, co-edited by Corrie Ellis, Summer Gray, and myself, that was launched with a press conference at COP 20 in Lima in December 2014: At the COP: Global Climate Justice Youth Speak Out [https://climatejusticeproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/foran-ellis-and-gray-2014-at-the-cop.pdf]. A team of eight made it to the COP 21 in Paris. Our recent writing can be found at a new website we are in the process of constructing: http://www.climatejusticeproject.org/mission/ 2017 SSSP Annual Meeting – Call for Papers 2017 Program Theme: Narratives in the World of Social Problems: Power, Resistance, Transformation 67th SSSP Annual Meeting August 11-13, 2017 Montreal Bonaventure Hotel Montreal, Quebec Canada Those who tell the stories rule society - Plato Our globalized, cyber-mediated world characterized by extraordinary social, political, economic, and moral fragmentation raises a variety of questions about social problems, including: How do people who experience the consequences of social problems understand the causes of their misery? How do people not suffering understand the experiences of those who do? How do activists convince others to work toward social change? The answer to a variety of such questions is the same: Narratives, or what simply are called “stories” in daily life. Social problem narratives create meaning from the buzzing confusion of practical experience, they convey complex experiences to others, they motivate, they shape public opinion and social action. Whether told as stories about unique people facing specific troubles or about types of people—the abused child, the terrorist, the welfare mother—in types of situations, social problem narratives are pervasive in daily life. Individuals tell stories to make sense of their troubling experiences, politicians tell stories to sell themselves and their policies; teachers, preachers and parents use stories to convey moral lessons; courts work through the telling and evaluating of stories. Narratives about social problems are pervasive because they are persuasive. Unlike statistics or research, stories can appeal to minds and to hearts: The story of the “Migrant Mother” told through the photographs of depression-era photographer, Dorothea Lange, for example, remains to this day a compelling testimony of the human tragedy created by economic collapse. Regardless of the extent to which images in a story match indicators of empirical reality, social problem narratives can be personally, socially, and politically consequential. These narratives are about power: Those told by people in privileged positions are assumed to be believable and important, while those told by others are routinely challenged, if not completely silenced; stories whose plots, characters, and morals reflect the status quo are more likely to be positively evaluated than those challenging entrenched power and privilege. Stories become material power when they shape public opinion and social policy. Yet social actors most certainly are not cultural robots who simply accept whatever images of them circulate in the social world. On the contrary: Narratives can be a site of resistance as individuals and groups challenge the truth of those offering ideological support for oppression. Resistance, in turn, can lead to authoring and promoting new stories that foster equality and thus are transformative. In order to understand public reactions toward social problems and, in order to do something about these conditions causing so much human misery, we need to know much more about the work of social problem narratives. In a world of countless competing stories, we need to know how some—and only some —stories achieve widespread cognitive and emotional appeal and go on to influence public opinion and social policy; how different stories appeal to people in different social positions. We need to know how stories promoting particular images of social problems reflect and challenge and/or perpetuate existing inequalities and structures of power, and how stories encourage or discourage social change. We need to more fully understand how story contents and meanings change as they circulate through particular societies and throughout the globe. The power and workings of social problems narratives will be the focus of our conversations at the 2017 meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems to be held in the fascinating, beautiful, bi-lingual, multi-cultural city of Montreal. I look forward to seeing you there. The Call for Papers for the 2017 SSSP Annual Meeting is now live until January 31, 2017! To submit an extended abstract or paper or to view your submitted abstracts and papers, visit the 2017 SSSP Annual Meeting portal here: http://www.sssp1.org/2017_Call_For_Papers Environment and Technology Division Proposed Sessions SSSP Annual Meeting 2017 Division Sessions: CRITICAL DIALOGUE (THEMATIC): “Applications in Environmental Studies & Narratives on Interdisciplinary Research” Session organizer: Victor Perez, University of Delaware, victorp@udel.edu REGULAR SESSION: “Food and Environment” Session organizer: Carmel E. Price, University of Michigan-Dearborn, carmelp@umich.edu CRITICAL DIALOGUE (THEMATIC): “Resistance Narratives and Scholar Activism” Session organizer: Erin Robinson, Canisius College, robinso5@canisius.edu Co-Sponsored sessions: REGULAR SESSION (THEMATIC): “The Technologies of Telling” co-sponsored with Institutional Ethnography Session organizer: Cheryl Zurowski, cdz@qbeach.ca REGULAR SESSION: “Environmental Health & Environmental Justice” co-sponsored with Conflict, Social Action and Change AND Health Session organizer: Marko Salvaggio, Goucher College, Marko.Salvaggio@goucher.edu REGULAR SESSION: “Geography and Human Capital” co-sponsored with Youth, Aging, and Life Course Session organizer: Rebecca Wang, Syracuse University, rwang09@syr.edu REGULAR SESSION (THEMATIC): “Global Environmental Justice: Stories of Power and Resistance” co-sponsored with Global Session organizer: Ian Carillo, icarillo@wisc.edu REGULAR SESSION (THEMATIC): “Environmental Racism: Power, Resistance, Transformation” co-sponsored with Racial and Ethnic Minorities Session organizer: Daina Harvey, dharvey@holycross.edu REGULAR SESSION: “Community Development and Local Food Systems” co-sponsored with Community Research and Development Session organizer: Leslie Hossfeld, lhossfeld@soc.msstate.edu Have a book or publication announcement? On the market? Have a grant or publishing opportunity? Interested in writing a short contribution for the newsletter? Contact us at etsssp@gmail.com - we’d love to hear from you! Notes from the Co-editors Happy fall! We were thrilled to receive so many contributions to the fall 2016 newsletter and hope the same trend continues in the spring. Don’t forget submit your papers to E&T sponsored sessions for the 2017 Annual Meeting – the call for papers is now live! Hope everyone’s semesters are going well. Best, Lisa and Clare, 2016-2017 E&T Newsletter Co-Editors Special thanks to John Foran, Tamara L. Mix, Angus Nurse, Nels Paulson, Victor M. Perez, and Erin E. Robinson for their contributions to this newsletter