Profile

My research focuses on analyzing how political and cultural conditions shape, constrain, and reinforce the exercise of power and the configuration of power structures. I largely concentrate on how dominant groups, elites, and cultural and political gatekeepers produce inequalities and shape socio-political conditions: most specifically, I focus upon rightist mobilization and collective action.

Drawing upon a power structure research framework, my dissertation uses California’s San Joaquin Valley as a case to examine the multidimensionality of elite mobilization in relation to an environmental threat. Analysis focuses upon the political, cultural, and environmental construction of the threat of water scarcity. This project employs a multi-methods approach, including network analyses and archival analysis. Data demonstrate that elite mobilization efforts present the problem of water scarcity as a political narrative that highlights extraneous adversaries and fails to account for the material outcomes of agricultural water pollution and groundwater extraction. My dissertation examines the confluence of ideological power and elite environmental diversion by coupling meaning with mobilization.

In future research I will further explore the relationship between inequality and environmental harms by examining how elite actions affect slow-onset environmental disasters, such as water and soil degradation.

Research and Teaching Interests:

Courses taught: 

Sociology 311--Introduction to Social Research

Sociology 380--Introduction: Deviance, Control, and Crime

Sociology 313--Social Issues and Movements

Sociology 484--Topics in Deviance, Control, and Crime