Focus Areas
Critical Urban Studies
CUES is happily housed in a Sociology Department because cities and urbanization have been central to sociology as a discipline since its founding. As a favorite site for the study of “modern society,” through material connections between colony and metropole, and in inspiring distinctions such as nature/society and Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, the city shaped sociology’s classical foundations. Yet despite generations of critiques, these binary categories continue to shape (and constrain) much contemporary urban sociological research. Instead, through our research and ongoing Critical Urban Studies (CUS) working group, CUES draws on critical traditions in social theory and geography–including historical materialism, regional planning, and de- and anti-colonial ecological thought–to contribute to the ongoing project of expanding the “epistemological unconscious” of urban sociology and to engage in interdisciplinary thinking in geography and the social sciences. Our methodological and theoretical commitments include:
- A historical, multi-spatial, and materialist approach to urban questions;
- Sensitivity to urbanization’s historical and contemporary entwinements with racial capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and other large-scale processes; and
- Attention to intersections of culture and political economy in the production and inhabitation of urban space.
Critical Sustainabilities
Environmental crisis amidst neoliberal modes of governance has brought a new era of green “solutionism,” marked by faith in technological fixes for systemic problems, the bifurcation of ecological from social questions, and an orientation toward stasis and reform rather than change and revolution. CUES examines these interventions and their consequences with the goal of thinking productively about progressive alternatives in both scholarly and policy realms.
Concretely, our research topics include ideas about “nature,” geographies of environmental and racial (in)justice, and the political economy and political ecology of disasters and post-disaster redevelopment, food and agriculture, energy and decarbonization, militarization, finance, housing, and urban sustainability and climate planning. Across these areas, we’ve drawn political and policy lessons from our work including how to “democratize the green city,” foreground affordable housing and anti-displacement policy in sustainability planning, and integrate visions for indigenous stewardship and other “vernacular sustainabilities” in land management.
Beyond critique, we also aim to explore and lift up engaged, future-facing, justice-oriented visions for socio-ecological change and movement building within and beyond the Santa Cruz region.
Transition Geographies and Politics
Questions of social change are another classic interest of sociology, and these are of renewed significance in the context of climate crisis, deepening inequality, and the many social and ecological “transitions” that the 21st century will require.
These transitions–from decarbonizing energy systems to building sustainable cities to indigenizing land stewardship–are material, cultural, and political. They involve transforming urban form, imaginaries, and relations between urban and rural space. And the contours of possible futures remain heavily contested; despite the inertia of existing material and social arrangements, there is nothing inevitable about the shape these transformations will take.
As the U.S. embarks on the most massive investment in infrastructure and transformation in land use in a century, as global ecological and geopolitical relations are destabilized, and in the context of movements for a “just transition,” emergent geographies, politics, and trajectories of social change are a key focus of CUES’s research. We have a specific interest in urban-rural interfaces–in the context of intensifying environmental risk and social inequality–and in landscape-scale issues of planning, land use, and infrastructure development related to energy, housing, transit, and conservation across urban and rural space.