Category Archives: Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration

New article by yours truly!

Posted in Environmental justice, Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, Photography, Research & writing, San Joaquin Valley, Voices from the Valley by

I’ve got an article coming out today in the inaugural edition of the new UC Press journal Boom: A Journal of California.  I wrote it with one of my Master’s advisors from UC Davis, Julie Sze.  I’m excited because Boom is designed to be a cross-over publication read by scholars and the general public alike, so among other things, it looks beautiful and some of the articles are available for free online (hard-copies are also for sale in some news outlets and bookstores).  The editors also tried to make it “count” for academic contributors by putting it through the usual scholarly peer review process.  I wish this new publication every success and hope to see more like it in the future!

Our piece features a short article on environmental justice in the Central Valley, some of my photos from the 25 Stories from the Central Valley exhibit, and excerpts from my interviews with Teresa DeAnda (Earlimart), Mary Lou Mares (Kettleman City) and Debbie Reyes (Fresno).  I’ll be attending one of the launch events at the Oakland Museum tomorrow night.

Here’s the intro text:

When Californians think of the Central Valley, they often think of its problems: poverty, pesticides, disputes over the allocation of irrigation water, farmworker deaths, and, most recently, a cluster of babies born with birth defects in the small town of Kettleman City. These are some of the ways this region makes the statewide news. But the Central Valley also has a rich history of community organizing and its own stark beauty. These photographs by Tracy Perkins and the oral histories she collected to accompany them document an important aspect of life there: environmental-health problems and the diverse network of advocates who are fighting to solve them.

Practically speaking, the Central Valley is all but invisible to those who live outside it. Over the course of the twentieth century, legislators and growers turned this 500-mile-long stretch of land into one of the most intensively farmed regions in the world, watered by one of the world’s most ambitious irrigation systems. Although California leads the nation in agricultural production, many Californians have little sense of what goes on in the agricultural regions of their state. This invisibility helps to explain why California has located two of the state’s three hazardous-waste landfills and many of its prisons there, while also continuing to allow high levels of toxicity in the air and water…

Read the complete article for free on the Boom website here, or to get the full impact of the beautiful print version, download the pdf here.

Photo exhibit!

Posted in Environmental justice, Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, Photography, San Joaquin Valley, Voices from the Valley by

This Friday opens the latest exhibit of my photos in the “25 Stories from the Central Valley” collection.  They are already online here, but there’s something extra-special about seeing them “in the flesh” too.  I dropped them off on Sunday and had a good time deciding how to group them in the space they’ll be displayed.

The exhibit is hosted by the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust at their scenic headquarters in Fresno.  I’m excited about the show for two reasons.  First, this is the first conservation group (as opposed to environmental justice group) that I’ve had contact with in the Central Valley, and I’m happy the photos can serve as a small bridge between these two facets of environmentalism.  Second, we’ve already shown the photos on the campus where the project started, UC Davis, and this will be the first time they are shown in the region where they were actually taken.

I’ll be attending the exhibit’s reception this Friday (details here).  Hope to see you there!

Death threats and sociologists

Posted in Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, University life by

Death threats and sociologists aren’t words you often hear in the same sentence.  Since I’m in training to be a sociologist, this is a source of some comfort to me.

Given how tame my life has been, I have a perhaps unreasonable fear of death-threats, knocks on the door in the middle of the night, and other forms of intimidation.  I’ve known a few people who’ve had to deal with them, but they’ve almost always been doing much more controversial work than my own, and they’ve hardly ever been scholars.  So imagine my dismay this week when I learned that the right-wing attacks against sociologist Frances Fox Piven have escalated to the point of death threats.  This is especially alarming since Piven is the kind of scholar that I often hold up as a model for myself.  She’s spent her life studying social movements and politics in the US, and tries to make her work speak to audiences beyond just other scholars.

Piven is a prolific writer, and I’ve only read a fraction of her work.  She’s certainly on the political left, but hardly off the deep end.  Here’s what I’ve read by her so far:

And here’s some of the press on her frightening circumstances now:

2.15 update: