Environmental Justice & Inequality
My environmental research brings together diverse sociological and social science traditions to ask questions about how environmental inequalities are created and challenged.
Under review
Shifting terrains: soils and environmental risk perception following floods
Soil represents an understudied risk environment that can be detrimental to disaster survivors’ physical, mental, and social health. Previous research suggests that flooding can mobilize and redeposit contaminants, such as E. coli and heavy metals, in residential soils where exposure can pose risk to human health. However, few studies have examined how survivors understand and navigate post-disaster environmental health risks. Using a novel research design that combines residential soil testing with semi-structured interviews, this study analyzes environmental health risk perception in the post-disaster context to better understand how residents perceive and respond to environmental health risks.
Under review
Recognition and ethical research practices: The role of community specialists
Current long-term disaster research practices can unintentionally harm communities because of gaps in institutional requirements, ethical toolkits, and research design guidance. We argue that the environmental justice concept of recognition is key to addressing the problem of unethical practices in long-term disaster research. One way recognition can be achieved is through Community Specialists, paid research team members who live and work in the disaster-affected community. To illustrate the value of Community Specialists for enhancing recognition, we offer a collective autoethnographic of Project BRIDGE, a disaster recovery research project undertaken in Robeson County, North Carolina.
2022
Water Justice across the Rural-Urban Interface: The Making of Hydrosocial Territories in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley, Society & Natural Resources
Research on rural-urban water struggles establishes the importance of symbolic spatial categories for facilitating and justifying rural-to-urban water transfers. I build on this scholarship by asking how officials construct the rural-urban interface, or patterns of interaction across spatial boundaries, during water conflicts. This study takes a historical case study approach centered on the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) in New Mexico (USA), a transbasin diversion authorized in 1962 to bring water from the rural San Juan River Basin into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use…
2022
Agrochemical exposure & environmental illness: legal repression of Latin American banana workers, The Sociological Quarterly
Prior research on legal repression shows how elites use criminal law to demobilize collective challenges, yet social control efforts based in civil law have received inadequate attention. In this study, we develop the concept of elite legal framing to examine how corporations deploy “soft” forms of repression within the civil justice system. Drawing on court, government, and media documents, we analyze a series of transnational civil litigation cases over pesticide exposure on Dole-contracted banana plantations in Nicaragua. Results highlight how the corporate defendants promoted a corruption narrative that diffused through the media and legal system to successfully discredit farmworker claims.
2021
Settler colonialism and rural environmental injustice: water inequality on the Navajo Nation, Rural Sociology
Environmental justice research highlights the distinct processes generating environmental problems in rural places. Rural communities of color suffer the dual disadvantage of spatial and racial marginalization, yet we know little about the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. This study draws on theories of settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to investigate the historical formation of water inequality in the American Southwest…
2020
Petrochemical pollution and the suppression of environmental protest, Sociological Inquiry
While research has established how elite actors can work to protect structures that contribute to environmental harm, relatively less is known about the cultural resources that can serve elite interests at the local level. In cases of localized pollution, multiple groups have vested interests in protecting corporate legitimacy. We draw on treadmill of production theory and collective identity to analyze a case of community petrochemical contamination. Specifically, we asked: (1) how elite actors appropriated cultural resources to protect productivity following a legitimization crisis; and (2) how discursive retaliation matters in understanding the pathways to violence when protest threatens an industrial community’s economic identity…
2017
Media and ‘undone science’ in West Virginia’s Elk River chemical spill, Environmental Sociology
In January 2014, a storage tank in Charleston, West Virginia leaked 10,000 gallons of an industrial coal-cleansing chemical called ‘crude MCHM’ into the Elk River, poisoning the water supply of 300,000 residents. During the ensuing water crisis, conflict quickly developed over the risks of chemical exposure. Few studies on crude MCHM existed, leaving large knowledge gaps about the potential health consequences for residents in the affected area. This study utilizes newsprint coverage of the water crisis to analyze the media’s role in environmental and scientific disputes. Specifically, I examine how news actors can influence scientific knowledge production during times of crisis…
Laura A. Bray 