Bio
Jordan Fox is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology who works in the areas of environmental sociology, political ecology, historical sociology, and the philosophy and history of science. He is both a theorist and empirical researcher, who primarily uses qualitative methods. While his theoretical interests are broad, they are usually, at least in some way, inspired by Richard Levins. His current research examines a range of topics, including how globalized social processes link up environments across the world in ways that drive political, cultural, and legal problems; the continued relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s approach to interdisciplinarity and the application of this approach to contemporary environmental inequalities; and how social theory and practice can best incorporate both the power and limits of the natural sciences. He has several ongoing projects, including a political economic history of invasive species ecology, and, with Dan Shtob of Brooklyn College, an examination of how legal and financial actors often take advantage of ecological complexity to remake nature towards their own ends. His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental Sociology, Sociological Forum, The Sociological Quarterly, Environment and Planning D; Society and Space, Monthly Review, The Journal of Classical Sociology, Environmental Justice, and many more. A sampling of relevant research is below.
Recent publications
Shtob, Dan, and Jordan Fox Besek. 2021. “Environmental Precedent and Environmental Sociology: Integrating Law and the Study of Socio-Environmental Interactions.” Sociological Forum 36 (2): 712-34.
Besek, Jordan Fox, Patrick Greiner, and Brett Clark. 2021. “W.E.B. Du Bois and Interdisciplinarity: A Comprehensive Understanding the Scholar’s Approach to Natural Science.” Journal of Classical Sociology 21(2): 144-164.
Besek, Jordan Fox. 2021. “On the Interactive Nature of Place-Making: Modifying Growth Machine Theory to Capture the Spatial and Temporal Connections that Spawned the Asian Carp Invasion.” The Sociological Quarterly 62(1): 121-142.
Besek, Jordan Fox and Jeanine Cunningham. 2020. “On the Environmental Embeddedness of Redneck Identity and Politics: The Original Redneck Fishin’ Tournament and Invasive Species in a Rural Community.” Sociologia Ruralis 60(2): 394-413.
Besek, Jordan Fox. 2019. “Invasive Uncertainties: Environmental Change and the Politics of Limited Science.” Environmental Sociology 5(4): 416-427.
(Runner-up for the 2020 Environmental Sociology Early Career Prize). Besek, Jordan Fox and Richard York. 2019. “Towards a Sociology of Biodiversity Loss.” Social Currents 6(3): 239-254.