Historicizing environmental sociology: Insights from science and technology studies

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

This article develops a framework to enrich comparative-historical and quantitative approaches to environmental sociology with insights from the theoretical perspectives and data-method orientations of science and technology studies. Emergent questions driven by the climate crisis and growing awareness of the historical and spatial embeddedness of social inequalities (for a present example, see the climate-focused ASA sessions cross-listed between the Environmental Sociology, Comparative-Historical, and SKAT sections), combined with methodological innovations in computational and quantitative approaches to archival research (e.g., Candipan and Tollefson 2024; Scoville et al. 2023; see also the present "Comparative-Historical Sociology and Computational Social Science" ASA session), are driving a renewed interest in systematic, large-scale, and data-intensive approaches to the quantitative and historical sociology of social-environmental relations. Historical environmental sociology is at a crossroads: Limited access to historical data has walled us off from a robust empirical engagement with history, as the subfield is built on a foundation of case studies set in the contemporary period; at the same time, as new methods open old archives to new interpretations, environmental sociologists are increasingly armed with new opportunities for theory-building. As such, historical environmental sociology is faced with an urgent question: How do we understand the relationship between theory, data, and method in the context of changing analytic tools? What doors might this open to build general (or specific) theory from an accumulating universe of case studies? And how might we reckon with a historical perspective?

Author

• Jonathan Tollefson, University of Chicago