Sociology Faculty at SUNY Plattsburgh - Dr. Lauren Eastwood

Sociology Faculty - Dr. Lauren Eastwood

Associate Professor of Sociology

While I think of myself as an environmental sociologist, what this means to me is that I approach "the environment" with an eye to analyzing the social institutions that intersect with the natural world (broadly defined). I have a great appreciation for environmental science. Yet, in my own scholarship, I look at the ways in which human institutions and organizations frame particular environmental issues. My two main research areas take up "civil society" participation in policy making. One major research area, addressing participation in UN-based environmental policy-making processes, compares civil society participation in the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Forum on Forests. The other ongoing research project that I am conducting involves the shifting politics of Coalbed Methane (CBM) and uranium extraction in Montana and Wyoming. In this latter project, I am interested in community members' responses to energy extraction (or "development") in their communities as they engage in concerted activities to either contest or promote resource extraction.

I am connected to a group of U.S. and Canadian scholars who utilize the methodology of Institutional Ethnography, which takes as a research problematic the manner in which everyday activities are organized by larger social relations.

Theoretically, my research is informed by a post-structuralist analysis of discourse, power, and governmentality, combined with a historical materialist analysis of people's actual activities.

Education

• Ph.D. in Sociology, Syracuse University, 2002
• M.A. in Sociology, Syracuse University, 1996
• B.A. in Environmental Studies, Rollins College, 1991

Teaching Areas

• Sociology of Women
• Sociological Theory
• Sociology of the Environment

Research Areas

• Civil society participation in UN-based environmental policy-making: Global environmental governance.
• Community responses to coalbed methane and uranium extraction in the U.S., particularly in the Powder River Basin Area of Wyoming and Montana.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

• The Social Organization of Policy: An Institutional Ethnography of UN Forest Deliberations (2005) New York: Routledge
• Making the Institution Ethnographically Accessible: UN Document Production and the Transformation of Experience. (2006). In Institutional Ethnography as Practice. Edited by Dorothy E. Smith. Alta Mira Press.
• Contesting the Economic Order: Resisting the Media Construction of Reality. (2006). In Igniting a Revolution. Edited by Best, Stephen and Anthony J. Nocella. AK Press

Contact Dr. Lauren Eastwood

Office: Redcay Hall 245
Phone: (518) 564-3309
E-mail: eastwole@plattsburgh.edu