Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies / Edition 1

by Valerie J. Gunter

Overview

Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies is a thoughtful guide to the spirited public controversies that inevitably occur when environments and human communities collide. The movie An Inconvenient Truth based on the environmental activism of Al Gore and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina are specifically highlighted. Authors Valerie Gunter and Steve Kroll-Smith begin with a simple observation and offer a provocative case study approach to the investigation of community and environmental controversies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900761987504
Publication date:	11/22/2006
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

At the time Hurricane Katrina struck, Valerie J. Gunter was an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of New Orleans. She spent most of the 2005-2006 academic year as a visiting associate professor at Michigan State University, from which she had received her Ph D in sociology in 1994. She has spent over 20 years researching the controversial processed by which environmental issues become registered on community and national political agendas. Articles reporting the results form this research have been published in such journals as Social Problems, The Sociological Quarterly, The American Sociologist, Sociological Inquiry, and Rural Sociology. She is a co-editor of Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine.

Professor Kroll-Smith is the Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He was formerly a research professor of sociology at the University of New Orleans. He has edited and written 5 books on environmental hazards and disasters, health and the environment, and sociologists as expert witnesses. He is the current editor of Sociological Inquiry and the 2004 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution Award in the study of Environment and Technology. Kroll-Smith’s current work is the problem of race, class, and water in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane’s Katrina and Rita. He also regularly contributes to the growing scholarship on the sociology of sleep.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. When Environments and Communities Collide
2. The Presence of the Past
3. Trust and Betrayal
4. The Problem of Uncertain Knowledge
5. Perceptions of Fairness
6. Oppositional Activity and Social Capital
7. Social Facts and Brute Facts: Confounding the Social and the Physical
Postscript
References
Index
About the Authors