Bob Bolin
Professor
Ph.D., Sociology/Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder
SHESC Themes: Societies and their Natural Environments, Urban Societies
Field Specializations: Geography, Political Ecology, Risks and Hazards, Social Theory, Urban Geography
Regional Focus: North America (Southwest)
Contact: Bob Bolin, SHESC 276
Research:
Bob Bolin's research program, prior to coming to ASU, was focused on environmental hazards and issues affecting the long-term recovery of households and communities after large scale 'natural' disasters. A series of NSF grants from 1979 through the mid-1990s supported that research program. His research emphasized the importance of social inequalities in shaping the severity of disasters and their long-term consequences on disadvantaged populations. While Bolin's work in the 1980s was more or less conventional 'disaster sociology,' in the 1990s he broke with that tradition and began to fully employ critical geographical theory to analyze environmental hazards and issues of race, class and political economy in processes of social marginalization. His move to critical geography was developed in several studies on California earthquakes in the 1990s, and he continues to employ that general theoretical approach on his most recent research projects.
Once at ASU, Bolin's research shifted from natural hazards to the political ecology of technological hazards and questions of social vulnerability and environmental justice. Much of his work at ASU has been supported by the Central Arizona Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research project at the International Institute for Sustainability. A group, of which Bolin was a part, formed the interdisciplinary Environmental Risk Group as part of the CAP-LTER. That group has been pursuing a series of studies looking at various aspects of technological hazards, toxic industrial emissions, environmental pollutants and population distributions in Phoenix. Bolin's particular interests in this area include both the historical geography of racism as well as current issues in environmental justice in Phoenix.
In fall 2004, a research team involving Bolin received multi-year funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct research on water resources and decision making under conditions of long-term climatic uncertainty and drought in central Arizona. That project, the Decision Center for a Desert City, will expand Bolin's research agenda to include vulnerability to drought and related environmental hazards in Phoenix and the rapidly growing peri-urban areas on the Mogollon Rim. As with his other environmental research, his interest here will be on interdisciplinary sociospatial analysis of people's access to resources, environmental change and processes of social marginalization in a rapidly urbanizing region.
Research Projects:
Geographic Vulnerability Analysis of Water Resources in the Phoenix Area
Phoenix Area Environmental Justice Project Series
Social Vulnerability, Water Resources and Climatic Uncertainty in Exurban Arizona Communities
Teaching:
Bolin's academic background is interdisciplinary in sociology and geography with a focus on socioenvironmental transformations. He received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Colorado, Boulder (Ph.D., 1976). His primary graduate training was in environmental sociology, hazards geography, urban geography and social theory. Most of his funded research since graduate school has focused on environmental issues, including hazards, disasters and the dynamics of social inequality and marginalization in the production of environmental inequality. Bolin spent the bulk of his career, prior to coming to ASU, at New Mexico State University, where he progressed through the ranks in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He served as chair of that department for four years in the 1990s and moved to ASU in January 1998, joining the Department of Sociology. In fall 2004 Bolin transferred to the Department of Anthropology to better pursue his environmental research and teaching agenda in a more supportive and congenial departmental setting.
Bolin is the director of the doctoral program in environmental social science.
Select Publications:
Bolin, B., Collins, T. & Darby, K. (in press). Fate of the Verde: Water, environmental conflict and the politics of scale in the Arizona Central Highlands. Geoforum.
Collins, T. & Bolin, B. (2007). Characterizing vulnerability to water scarcity: The case of a groundwater-dependent, rapidly urbanizing region. Environmental Hazards, 7(4), 399-418.
Grineski, S., Bolin, B. & Boone, C. (2007). Criteria air pollution and marginalized populations: Environmental inequity in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Social Science Quarterly, 88(2), 535-554.
Bolin, R. (2006). Race, Class, and Disaster Vulnerability. In H. Rodriguez, E. L. Quarantelli, & R. Dynes (Eds.), Handbook of disaster research. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Bolin, R., Grineski, S., & Collins, T. (2005). Geography of despair: Environmental racism and the making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Human Ecology Review, 12(2), 156-168.
Bolin, B., Nelson, A., Hackett, E., Pijawka, D., Smith, S., Sadalla, S., Sicotte, D. & O'Donnell, M. (2002). The ecology of technological risk in a sunbelt city. Environment and Planning, 34, 317-339.
Bolin, R. & Stanford, L. (1998). The Northridge Earthquake: Vulnerability and disaster. London: Routledge.
