Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies

Front Cover
SAGE Publications, 2007 - Nature - 241 pages
This book is a thoughtful guide to the public debate currently raging and highlighted in the movie An Inconvenient Truth based on the environmental activism of Al Gore and on the April 3, 2006 Cover of Time magazine about the climate crisis.. The Devastation of Hurricane Katrina is explored in this timely book. The authors begin with a simple observation.; environmental issues are almost always contested and are likely to transform communities into volatile places. Students of environment, as well as those interested in communities or social conflicts, will find this book a useful guide to a rich and provocative case-study literature. The authors hope that these studies will inspire students to engage in spirited thinking original research, and action.

About the author (2007)

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 PhD 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.

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