Date
Abstract
Integrating Environmental Privileges & Problems
This seminar will use a computational social science approach to explore environmental inequality, defined broadly as the inequitable distribution of environmental privileges and problems across social groups, throughout the continental United States. Referencing nearly 1 billion chemical releases originating from industrial facilities in 2007, the seminar will explore the surface of US industrial toxicity by:
- Identifying facilities that generate far more hazardous toxicity than might be expected.
- Linking these toxicity metrics to population information (e.g., race and class) at a similar scale.
After identifying over-polluters and impact hotspots by population types, the co-location of these two faces of inequality suggests that not only are environmental justice communities dealing with more than their fair share of contamination in general, but they are also likely to have the “worst of the worst" polluters in their neighborhoods. By linking these two faces of inequality, this work hopes to contribute to the ongoing conversation in environmental social science about the nature of environmental injustice while elucidating the social systems and correlates that governs the distribution of environmental resources.
Presenters
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Mary Collins
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Mary Collins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with SESYNC in 2015, prior to moving to SUNY to begin teaching and expanding her research program. From a sociological perspective, she is interested in the interdependence of social and ecological systems, particularly related to issues of equity and justice in the context of human health. Mary’s research areas include theorization of the environment-society interface...
Image
Mary Collins
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Mary Collins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with SESYNC in 2015, prior to moving to SUNY to begin teaching and expanding her research program. From a sociological perspective, she is interested in the interdependence of social and ecological systems, particularly related to issues of equity and justice in the context of human health. Mary’s research areas include theorization of the environment-society interface, environmental disproportionality at various spatial scales, environmental health inequality, environmental justice, technological environmental risk perception, collaborative dispute resolution in environmental disaster recovery, and quantitative modeling methods. The vast majority of her work relies on large-data, computational, social-science approaches.
Presenters
Time
12:30 p.m. ET
Location
SESYNC – 1 Park Place, Suite 300 Annapolis, MD 21401
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