Immersion Workshop: Methods in Social Science

Dr. Peter Alagona is an associate professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before coming to UCSB, Pete received his PhD in history from UCLA and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. An environmental historian, historian of science, and nature-culture geographer, his work explores what happens when humans share space and resources (their habitats) with other species: how we interact with non-human creatures, how we make sense of these interactions, why we fight so much about them, what we can learn from them, and how we might use these lessons to foster a more just and sustainable society.

Dr. Shannon Elizabeth Bell is Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech and is also an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies, the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, and the Global Forum on Urban and Regional Resilience. Before joining the faculty at Virginia Tech in 2017, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research is broadly focused on environmental justice and injustice and spans a number of sub-disciplines, including environmental sociology, social movements, gender, and rural sociology. She has used a variety of research methods in her work, including interviews, participant observation, content analysis, surveys, geospatial viewshed analysis, and the participatory action research method of Photovoice. Shannon is author of two award-winning books, both of which draw on her ethnographic research in the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia. Her first book, Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice, was published by University of Illinois Press in 2013 and received the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award, a silver medal from the Nautilus Book Awards, and was Runner-Up at the Green Book Festival. Her second book, Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia, was published by MIT Press in 2016 and is winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award and a gold medal from the Nautilus Book Awards. Professor Bell is the 2017 recipient of the Rural Sociological Society’s Excellence in Research Award, and she has also received the Environmental Sociology Practice & Outreach Award, the Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology & Humanism, and the University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award. 

Dr. Paige West is The Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University where she holds an endowed chair. Her broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. Since the mid 1990s, she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more. Paige is the founder of the journal Environment and Society, the chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia University, a fellow (and past chair) of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, and is the past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In addition to her academic work, Paige is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. She is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge. https://paige-west.com 

Dr. Simone Pulver is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Environmental Leadership Incubator at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she leads a research and teaching team that investigates patterns in the environmental impacts of business, what drives those patterns, and how those drivers might be transformed. Her interdisciplinary research integrates perspectives from organizational theory, environmental and economic sociology, and global governance. She holds graduate degrees in sociology and energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University. Simone has engaged with SESYNC since 2014 in a range of roles. She served twice as a Distinguished Faculty Mentor for the Postdoctoral Immersion Program, and she was in residence at SESYNC in the Spring of 2016 as a Faculty Sabbatical Fellow. She is also co-leader of a SESYNC-funded book workshop and project, titled Foundations of Socio-Environmental Research: Legacy readings with commentaries, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

External Links:
https://www.es.ucsb.edu/index.php/people/simone-pulver