I am proud to be the faculty advisor to Lambda Pi Chi at UD.  If you are looking for a sorority on campus devoted to empowering women, has a dedication to social justice, and that promotes unity, solidarity, and professional development, then look no further!  Click Lambda Pi Chi for more information about the national chapter.

It was my pleasure to interview Dr. Adam Rome on Campus Voices to promote the third annual Lights, Camera, Earth! film festival.  Our interview was full of intriguing questions about climate change, resilience, and how each of the films touched on numerous themes related to climate change and the impact of carbon emissions on the planet.  Listen to the interview here, and be sure to catch all of the films this weekend!  The films are free and open to the public, and all have prominent moderators who will guide audience discussion after each film.  See you there!

Come join your fellow students and the Newark community at this year’s Lights, Camera, Earth! film festival.  Free and open to the public, the event is in its third year and promises to be entertaining, informative, and engaging.  After each film, participate in a discussion about the film with faculty from UD.  More information available here.

In the fall 2016 semester, I will be teaching Environment and Health (SOCI 335), which examines how sociologists help to illuminate the relationship between environmental burdens and human health.  How communities mobilize around these issues is a very important component of the course.  Here’s a current example of incredible importance in St Louis, and helps to raise many questions that we try to answer in the class:

Recent work on Internet “echo chambers” shows how an individual’s beliefs about science, valid or invalid, are reinforced due to the way that social media works (e.g., Facebook).  In short, as Andrews notes, echo chambers describe online media as virtual spaces “wherein information or beliefs are reinforced by repetitive transmission inside an enclosed virtual space. These spaces, which also serve to keep contrasting views at bay, may explain why there are so many groups of people online – particularly on Facebook – that steadfastly believe information that is demonstrably nonsensical.”

My work on how the Internet functions to facilitate online social movements that resist scientific consensus, such as the vaccine-autism movement, touched on a similar idea a few years ago.  I emphasized how websites link together to form an “echo chamber” of sorts.  I have reproduced the chapter’s synopsis here:

“This chapter explores how the Internet emerged as an invaluable resource for a populist social movement that challenged scientific consensus and framed autism as an instance of medically induced harm. Given the overwhelming scientific evidence debunking the vaccine-autism link, how do claims that vaccines cause autism persist and what is the role of the Internet in their perseverance? I argue that the networking capacity of the Internet allows unbridled, unfiltered claimsmaking across websites (Maratea 2009) and allows parents to validate their experiences with the onset of autism by sharing their stories online with others. The Internet serves as a venue for vaccine-critical parent organizations and nonexpert claimsmakers, who function as ‘movement entrepreneurs’ (Earl and Schussman 2003, p. 157), to catalyze and sustain opposition to scientific consensus with their own forms of evidence supporting their claims that vaccines cause autism.”

The moral of the story: be wary of your social media feed because it might not allow you many alternative perspectives on an issue, and take note of how websites that you use for scientific information make claims and link to one another. Read both the Andrews story and my chapter for more food for thought!

Perez, Victor W. 2012. “The Movement Linking Vaccines to Autism: Parents and the Internet.” Pp. 71-89 in Making Sense of Social Problems: New Images, New Issues, edited by Joel Best and Scott R. Harris. Boulder. CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Andrews, Robin. 2016. “How Misinformation Spreads on the Internet.” IFL Science, January 6. Viewed January 7 at: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/facebook-echo-chambers-help-spread-and-reinforce-misinformation.

I recently published a short article about my use of PolicyMap to teach environmental justice in the classroom.  Students can quickly see how environmental burdens and health disparities are deeply connected to race, class, and geography, and the maps allow students to see how the social issues are lived out in space. The cloud-based, GIS software is very easy to use and accessible, and requires no training in geography to make powerful maps of the social conditions that we often discuss out of their (important) geo-spatial contexts.  Download the article here:

The Geography of Environmental (In)Justice