Dr. Meredith Hastings, professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and deputy director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and Dr. Scott Frickel, professor of Sociology and Environment and Society, are co-teaching ENVS 1247: Clearing the Air: Environmental Studies of Pollution.

In the past, the chances of human exposure would have been minimal, but climate change is dialing up the possibility of contamination. As extreme rain storms become more common, these low-lying streets around the Woonasquatucket are more vulnerable to flooding, which could release chemicals, volatile organic compounds or heavy metals like lead or cadmium from the ground or the river bottom.

The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) announced the launch of a free fare pilot program on the R-Line, RIPTA’s most frequent and highest-ridership route, connecting Providence and Pawtucket. Complementary Paratransit Service Will Also Be Fare Free

Thousands of factories once lined the waterfronts of U.S. cities, churning out textiles, chemicals and many other products. Most of the buildings are long gone, often replaced by parks or surrounded by neighborhoods, but the pollution they dumped into the water and soil can remain. In many cases, that pollution was never documented, write sociologists Thomas Marlow, James Elliott and Scott Frickel.

Congratulations to Yifan Shen for successfully defending his dissertation, “Bringing Oppenheimer Back: The Continuing Importance of Oppenheimer’s Family Sociology for Understanding the Shifting Economic Organization of American Families.”

Congratulations to Danielle Falzon for successfully defending her dissertation entitled, “The Business of Adaptation: Reproducing Inequality in the Face of Climate Crisis.”

Michael D. Kennedy, professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University, is an expert on East European social movements and system change. A candidate to be vice president of the American Sociological Association, Kennedy teaches a provocative sociology course, Power, Knowledge and Justice in Global Social Change.

Congratulations to Meg Collier for successfully defending her dissertation entitled, “Inequality, Brokerage, and the Mobilization of Social Capital in Elementary Schools”.

Congratulations to Sam Brady for being awarded the Alden Speare, Jr. Award, which recognizes superior achievement in the Master of Arts thesis within the Department of Sociology.

Congratulations to Yasemin Bavbek for being awarded the Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Award

Congratulations to Chantel Pheiffer for successfully defending her dissertation entitled, “Internal Migration, Urban Living, and the Health Penalty among Women in South Africa”.

Congratulations to Chinyere Agbai for successfully defending her dissertation entitled, “Wealth Begins at Home: A Historical Analysis of the Role of the 1944 GI Bill in Linking, Race, Place, Wealth, and Health in America.”

Congratulations to Quinn Bernier for successfully defending his dissertation, “Risky Business: Agricultural Transformation in Tanzania.”

Congratulations to prabh kehal for successfully defending their dissertation entitled, “Racializing Meritocracy: Ideas of Excellence and Exclusion in Faculty Diversity."

Congratulations to Kristen McNeill for successfully defending her dissertation, “Cultural Foundations of Creditworthiness: Gendered Evaluations of Borrowers in Colombian Microcredit.”

Congratulations to Izzy Notter for successfully defending her dissertation, “Intergenerational Transfers Between Adult Children and Their Aging Parents.”

Congratulations to Amanda Zagame for successfully defending her dissertation, “Understanding Fathering and Adolescents’ Wellbeing: Father Figures and Transition to Young Adulthood.”

Congratulations to Laura Garbes for successfully defending her dissertation, “Sound, Public Radio, and Particularistic Performance Standards in the Workplace.”

Congratulations to Liz Brennan on successfully defending her dissertation, “Autonomy Disrupted: Law, Technology, and its Impact on Professions’ Autonomy Following the Implementation of the Electronic Health Record.”

John was named a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association on February 28, 2022.

Michael Kennedy speaks with NBC 10 about his Friends of Ukraine initiative that seeks to send medical aid to the country.

Aaron Niznik has successfully defended his dissertation, “Cultivating the City: The Evolution of the Urban Gardening Movements in Boston, MA and Austin, TX.”

Professor John Diamond to join Brown University's Department of Sociology.

Co-authored by Professor Scott Frickel, Residues offers readers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation.

Professor Sandra Lynn Barnes to join Brown University's Department of Sociology.

Public sociology is quite attentive to the various publics that make up that general public our political leaders represent

For G. Wayne Miller of The Providence Journal, our own Dr. Michael D. Kennedy describes both COVID and 9/11 and its aftermath as “generation-making events” – events, he says, that profoundly affected people of his students’ ages, late teens and early twenties, in ways that will last their lifetimes. On a broader level, he asserts, each event affected all populations to some degree and “changed the institutions of our society.”

Jon Nelson has successfully defended his dissertation, "Insuring Inequality: The Role of FEMA in Unequal Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise in Coastal New England."

Nicole Kreisberg has successfully defended her dissertation, “Nativity and Nativism in the U.S. Labor Market: Employment Discrimination Against Latino Immigrant Men.”

Dr. Ben Bradlow's dissertation, “Urban Origins of Democracy and Inequality: Governing São Paulo and Johannesburg, 1985-2016,” has been recognized with the following awards:

Professor Jayanti Owens has won the 2021 Outstanding Publication Award from the ASA section on "Sociology of Disability and Society". Her paper is "Social Class, Diagnoses of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and Child Well-Being," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 61 (2), 134-152, 2020.

Ricarda Hammer has successfully defended her dissertation entitled: "Citizenship and Colonial Difference: The Racial Politics of Rights and Rule Across the Black Atlantic."

Brown Sociology's Ricarda Hammer and Nabila Islam have been elected to ASA's Global and Transnational Sociology Section.

Brown Sociology's Kristen McNeill has been elected to ASA's Economic Sociology Section.

Prof. Owens Elected to ASA Disability and Society Section

Professor Jennifer Candipan has received a Spencer Foundation Large Research Grant on Education

Professor Prudence Carter has been named President-Elect of the American Sociological Association and the inaugural holder of the Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professorship at Brown.

Karolina Dos Santos has received a 2020 ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for her project, “Wards of Action: Internal and International Migration to Newark, NJ”.

Jordan Mosby has been awarded a 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. NSF Fellowships are extremely competitive.

PRUDENCE L. CARTER is currently the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley. Dean Carter has also been named President-Elect of ASA and is the inaugural holder of the Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professorship.

Professor Emily Rauscher and Ph.D. Candidate Ailish Burns explain in a podcast by Research Minutes how higher COVID-19 deaths with later school closures were found.

On April 20, 2021, Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the death of George Floyd. But despite the overwhelming evidence -- including the infamous video of him kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes -- that verdict was hardly a foregone conclusion.

Scott Frickel with co-authors published an opinion piece within Scientific American: Scientists Are Becoming More Politically Engaged – Here’s what that means beyond the 2020 elections. In many ways, science itself was on the ballot this Election Day.

Michael Kennedy has published an article in The Progressive Post where he discusses "the cultural politics defining the 2020 Election" detailing divisions within the United States, misinformation, and risings of extremism. "America is not only more divided than progressives imagined. What is worse is that we are polarized in ways that Trump conjures."

On 8/31/20 the Polish movement, Solidarność, can be called 40 years old.

Professor Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve and Professor Michael Kennedy discuss "engaged scholarship" during the COVID-19 crisis.

Ph.D. Candidate Tina Park was one of the two Brown graduate students achieving the Academic Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan Community Award for this year.

Drastic measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 have had an unintended & positive impact on the health of our environment.

Even in crisis, society doesn't stop.

Professor Jayanti Owens has been selected as a 2020 William T. Grant scholar.