About

As a professor of sociology at Lake Forest College, I teach classes on the social aspects of climate change, race and ethnic relations, data analysis, social movements, and globalization. I also co-facilitate an Intergroup Dialogue program.

I am an educator and an artist. I am a scholar and an activist.

I have a PhD in sociology from Indiana University. I conduct research on anti-capitalist sentiment, support for eco-socialism, degrowth, and international climate justice among climate change protestors in the U.S. and civil society organizations of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance. I am exploring Visual Sociology and beginning new research on ecovillages and other forms of alternative communities. My dissertation work involved interviewing over 100 Kenyan environmental organizations about their relationship with INGOs around the issue of climate justice. You will find some of my publications linked on the research page of this site.

While I have been successful as a scholar (earning tenure, serving as departmental chair, and being promoted to full professor), academic research is neither convincing nor accessible to enough people. This is why I am drawing on my experience and talents as a photographer and artist to begin to make short films about climate justice that I hope to make widely available and free.

I earned a BFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design. I worked as a photojournalist for a bit, including a month-long stint in Bosnia in the mid-1990s.

I volunteered for a year in central Mozambique, working with preschool and adult literacy teachers.

I earned an MA from Humboldt State University (now CalPoly Humboldt) in an interdisciplinary social science and natural science program entitled Environment & Community.

I have led wilderness trips in the American West from California to Alaska for teens from the US. I have facilitated a wilderness therapy program for adjudicated male youth in the desert of southcentral Utah. I have led international service learning trips to Kenya, Tanzania, and Nepal.

I am a husband and father, a teacher, a teller of eye-rolling dad jokes, a cyclist, a cook, and a photographer.

I aim to use the privileges and the talents I have to make the world a better place for others.