Abstract: In this talk Andrew Jorgenson provides an overview of his ongoing collaborative research streams that focus on various interconnections between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and industrial pollution, forms of social inequality, and human well-being. This theoretically-engaged research involves the combining of social and environmental datasets at various units of analysis, from the facility level up to the national level, and the use of various modeling techniques, including longitudinal regression analysis, multilevel regression analysis, and qualitative comparative analysis. Besides contributing to various areas of research within sociology, this work is intended to help situate fundamental sociological principles, especially the importance of social-structural context, more centrally within sustainability science.
Bio: Andrew Jorgenson is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology and Professor of Environmental Studies at Boston College. The primary area of his research is the human dimensions of global environmental change, with a focus on the drivers of greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, industrial pollution and land cover change. He also conducts research on the political-economic and environmental conditions that shape population health outcomes, uneven development, income inequality and environmental concern. His ongoing collaborative research on the facility-level and country-level factors that shape power plants’ carbon emissions has received multiple waves of funding from the National Science Foundation. Committed to both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, his recent published work appears in a variety of journals, including American Journal of Sociology, Nature Climate Change, Social Forces, Environmental Research Letters, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, Sustainability Science, Sociological Science, Climatic Change, Social Science Research, WIREs Climate Change, Sociological Forum, Ecological Economics, SSM Population Health, and Conservation Biology. He recently finished a book with coauthors Don Grant and Wesley Longhofer, titled Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sources of Climate-Disrupting Emissions, which will be published by Columbia University Press in 2020. He was the 2016-2017 chair of the Environmental Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and a member of the ASA’s Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change, which concluded in 2016. He served as the 2018-2019 chair of the Sociology of Development Section of the ASA and is currently an at large officer for the Society for Human Ecology. He is the founding co-editor of Sociology of Development, a journal published by University of California Press.
