About

Scott Frickel is a Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology at Brown University. His research interests include environment-society interactions, experts and knowledge/ignorance, social movements, social theory, risk and disaster, and urbanization. He has contributed to discussions on environmental policies, science activism, and the social dimensions of environmental issues, frequently offering commentary for various media outlets on topics such as climate policy, federal environmental oversight, and science activism. His work is characterized by a focus on the social dynamics that influence environmental and societal change.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Engineering ethics
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental science
• Geography
• Public relations
• Environmental planning
• Environmental ethics
• Political economy
• Business

Selected publications

• Community Resilience Planning: What New Methods Reveal About the Formation and Transformation of a Field

  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Community resilience planning (CRP) research encompasses diverse disciplinary foci, ranging from ecological and sociopolitical to engineering studies, and employs a range of analytic scales and methodologies. Despite the rise of integrative approaches to studying increasingly complex risks faced by communities—in particular, the growing, and often inequitable, impacts of climate and weather stressors and extremes—CRP remains a fragmented field of study and practice. This paper provides a broad map of the CRP field over the last 25 years, linking bibliometric methods with novel, network‐based, multilevel approaches to computational text analysis. Despite trends toward interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, our analysis demonstrates that the CRP field consists of divergent bodies of research, characteristic of disciplinary siloing. At the same time, new approaches to computational text analysis provide innovative ways to understand the epistemic and social links across subfields, revealing patterns of connectivity that traditional citation‐based bibliometric methods cannot access. Results indicate that the development and maturation of CRP are characterized in part by a longitudinal transformation in research methods and by a shift in substantive questions that CRP researchers are asking. These findings suggest that thematic and credit‐based structures operate in tandem to produce complex webs of interconnection across the disciplinary domains that have historically constituted the field. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Governing Climate Change in Communities, Cities, and Regions

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toxic Timescapes: Examining Toxicity across Time and Space

  Ambix · 2025-06-23 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hidden hazards

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Hidden hazards refer to toxic chemicals or other hazardous wastes that, while present in human environments, remain unknown or unrecognized as potential threats to public health and ecosystems. This entry reviews the history of hidden hazards in sociological research, and maps their connections, theoretically and empirically, to technological disasters and risk society. Particular emphasis on processes of socioenvironmental succession draws attention to how interlocking changes among places, people, and policies gradually produce hidden hazards through cumulative changes in industrial land use and reuse. Mounting evidence that hidden hazards are a systemic problem across urban North America exacerbates the urgency for finding and studying hidden hazards.

  PublisherDOI

• Environmental state

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-04-03

  book-chapterSenior author

  Accounts of the environmental state have played a relatively minor role in the development of environmental sociology. We review normative, historical, and institutionalist conceptualizations of the environmental state and offer a new definition centered on the provision of environmental welfare. The intellectual history environmental sociology points to reasons that the environmental state may have been neglected by the subfield and makes clear why other subfields and even disciplines have more successfully advanced environmental sociological state theory. More recent work in environmental sociology promises a deeper engagement with state theory, and we suggest promising areas for future research on the environmental state.

  PublisherDOI

• The political shaping of scientific fields in Argentina’s Pesticide Conflict: Evidence from domain-topic model analysis

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2023-08-17

  articleOpen access

  International audience

  PublisherOA PDF

• Entretien avec Scott Frickel (Brown University & Institute at Brown for Environment and Society)

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2023-01-01

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Ce portrait fait partie d'une série d'entretiens avec des figures importantes du champ des études sur l'ignorance.

  PublisherDOI

• The Environmental State: Nature and the Politics of Environmental Protection

  Sociological Theory · 2023 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Environmental ethics

  Basic oppositions between economic growth and environmental protection are well understood by sociologists, but the state’s role in environmental protection and regulation is underspecified in sociological theory. We define the environmental state and theorize two structuring forces central to its provision of environmental welfare. First, culturally distinctive constructions of nature shape environmental politics and statecraft. State actions linked to charismatic “special” nature often win broad political support, whereas actions linked to less resonant “ordinary” nature do not. Second, historical legacies of developmentalism shape environmental coalitions. Arms of the environmental state that combine extractive pasts with newer regulatory responsibilities are better able to build broad support, whereas narrowly regulatory or developmental arms struggle to do so. We illustrate the relevance of each process for the politics of environmental regulation and of technoscientific expertise. Both processes help explain the varied efficacy of environmental states and set the stage for their comparative study.

  PublisherDOI

• Parks, People, and Pollution: A Relational Study of Socioenvironmental Succession

  City and Community · 2023-02-06 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  The urban environmental inequality literature holds that marginalized communities are generally concentrated in neighborhoods with greater levels of industrial pollution and lesser access to parks and playfields. Yet, “green” and “brown” land uses are also linked historically and through contemporary practices of green redevelopment. This article thus begins from the understanding that it is important to analyze both forms of urban land use at once, to avoid mistaking one historical process for another. Focusing on Providence, Rhode Island (1970–2010), we leverage original historical data on the location and operating years of public parks alongside comprehensive industrial site data to analyze the joint transformation of residential populations, parks, and industry over time. We find that park access generally increases for Latinx residents; however, after accounting for increases in park access associated with past industrial land use, we find that census tracts with growing proportions of African American residents are associated with relatively less access to parks than other census tracts. Results reveal additional dimensions to the role of industrial history in shaping the socioenvironmental trajectory of local neighborhoods and additionally emphasize the importance of a historical and relational view of urban land use in urban environmental research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pathways for diversifying and enhancing science advocacy

  Science Advances · 2023 · 13 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Science is under attack and scientists are becoming more involved in efforts to defend it. The rise in science advocacy raises important questions regarding how science mobilization can both defend science and promote its use for the public good while also including the communities that benefit from science. This article begins with a discussion of the relevance of science advocacy. It then reviews research pointing to how scientists can sustain, diversify, and increase the political impact of their mobilization. Scientists, we argue, can build and maintain politically impactful coalitions by engaging with and addressing social group differences and diversity instead of suppressing them. The article concludes with a reflection on how the study of science-related mobilization would benefit from further research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Science activism is surging – which marks a culture shift among scientists

  2023-07-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: The Adoption of an Emerging Technology for Improving the Electrical Delivery System

  NSF · $212k · 2016–2018

• Collaborative Research: Urban-Environmental Restructuring in the U.S.

  NSF · $122k · 2009–2012

• Disaster Science and Technology Studies (DSTS): Advancing an Emerging Subfield

  NSF · $25k · 2012–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Thomas Marlow

  AstraZeneca (Sweden)

  26 shared

• J. J. Tollefson

  John Brown University

  16 shared

• Soraya Boudia

  Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société

  13 shared

• Florencia Arancibia

  Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

  11 shared

• James R. Elliott

  Rice University

  11 shared

• Samuel Bell

  10 shared

• Jody A. Roberts

  9 shared

• Carsten Reinhardt

  Bielefeld University

  8 shared

Education

• MS and PhD, Sociology

  University of Wisconsin

  2000