Sociology Faculty Publishes, Podcast's, & Presents

March 17, 2022
Photo of Zeker Baker

Professor Zeke Baker, Sociology Department, recently published two articles, discussed his research on a podcast about food security, and presented a paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society. See more about each below!

Loving it to death: Land use conflict, outdoor recreation and the contradictions of wilderness in Southeast Utah, USA 

Rock ClimberThis article, co-authored with ecologist Dr. Stephan Fick, was published in the journal Environmental Sociology. Dr. Baker discusses the motivation for the study: "Back in 2017, I was puzzled by events liked the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, and even more puzzled by the Trump Administration's actions to try and dismantle federal land protections—Not puzzled because these were terribly surprising, but puzzled because I wondered where land conflicts may be headed in the future of the American West." Together with ecologist Dr. Fick, Dr. Baker thus conducted fieldwork over two seasons in Bears Ears National Monument to investigate how people come to value the landscape, and how those values shape the politics of land management. The focus of this article is on recreational rock climbers, an increasing user group. As Dr. Baker describes: "What we find is a set of deep contradictions, in which people increasingly value the land as a special, even 'sacred', place, even as many of their practices on the land take part in the ruin they fear." The paper helps scholars and land managers understand the social process through which places risk being "loved to death." 

Teaching Environmentalism on a Warming Planet

Dr. Baker has recently published a Policy Forum article in History of Education Quarterly, the official journal of the History of Education Society. In this interview-style forum, Dr. Baker and coauthor Hunter Gehlbach (Johns Hopkins University School of Education), explore "the challenges and opportunities inherent in educating the next generation about climate change, drawing on analogues from the past and scholarship from the present to help us better understand the future." 

Early Warning Systems and Food Security in the Arctic

Dr. Baker is also featured on a podcast hosted by the American Meteorological Society Food Security Committee. The podcast episode is titled "Early Warning Systems and Food Security in the Arctic.” The Podcast Series, "Food Security 2022", features interviews and conversations with experts working in and across a range of fields, including climate science, agrometeorology, public policy, and sociology, who are all invested in improving access to food, human security, and resilience in the face of climate and related changes. 

Governing Futures? Security Technologies and the Climate Security Field in Sociological Perspective

This new paper was presented on a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). As Dr. Baker describes it, this work "is interested in investigating how the social structure of climate expertise, particularly as it has formed in the last two decades, enables or constrains how society deals with risks related to climate change." The paper focuses on account for the rise of concern for the U.S. national security implications of climate change—concern which Baker finds emerged within an organizational ecology of think-tanks that has formed as a site of exchange between political, bureaucratic, scientific, and media/cultural fields. The resulting 'climate security experts' are critical in developing what the paper analyzes as 'security technologies' that draw from innovations in climate science to facilitate strategic action based on anticipated future security environments. The paper concludes by critically assessing how climate security expertise aims to depoliticize climate change: although on the one hand serving to make climate change a real-world, 'non-political' threat, climate security, on the other hand, holds deeply political assumptions about the future that include preserving a society characterized by vast inequities regarding the impacts of climate change. The paper is part of Dr. Baker's larger book project on the dynamics of climate expertise.