Sabrina McCormick’s areas of expertise are in environmental and medical sociology, science and technology studies, and development. Dr. McCormick has recently completed her first book, No Family History: Finding the Environmental Links to Breast Cancer (Rowman & Littlefield), which explores the conflicts and controversies over shifting paradigms of breast cancer causation. She is directing a documentary film by the same title (www.nofamilyhistory.com) that will be released with the book. Her second book, Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation and the Re-Making of Knowledge (Temple University Press) looks at increasing social movement participation in scientific production. As a Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, she is studying one of the most pressing public health issues of the twenty-first century – illnesses induced by climate change. She is examining the social, economic and scientific aspects, including current policies and interventions, and dynamics of scientific change engendered by the need to address illness outcomes. Currently, she is focusing on the emergence of West Nile Virus and heat-induced illness. Dr. McCormick is also interested in adaptation to climate change more broadly and is studying such efforts in urban areas globally. Dr. McCormick also has several other research projects in process, including the buy-out of residents impacted by the Tar Creek Superfund site, megadevelopment in the Amazon and heat preparedness in the United States. Dr. McCormick completed her PhD in Sociology at Brown University in 2005 and has since been jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.
Articles
Damming Brazil: Local Movements and Transnational Struggles over Water, Society and Natural Resources (2009)
A growing range of contestation has arisen in the Brazilian Amazon regarding two proposed large...
Democratizing Science Movements: A New Framework for Contestation., Social Studies of Science (2007)
The Governance of Hydro-electric Dams in Brazil, Journal of Latin American Studies (2007)
This paper examines the governance of hydroelectric dam planning in Brazil with a particular focus...
The Brazilian Anti-Dam Movement: Knowledge Contestation as Communicative Action, Organization & Environment (2006)
The Personal Is Scientific, the Scientific Is Political: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement (with Phil Brown and Stephen Zvestoski), Sociological Forum (2003)
Books
Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation and the Remaking of Knowledge (2009)
Mobilizing Science theorizes and empirically explores the rise of a new kind of social movement...
No Family History: Investigating the Environmental Links to Breast Cancer (2008)
Breast cancer awareness has been on the rise for over twenty years, resulting in improved...
Contributions to Books
The Sociology of Risk (with Scott Frey and Eugene Rosa), 21st Century Sociology: A Reference Handbook (2007)
Presentations
Hot or Not?: Recognizing and Managing the Health Impacts of Climate Change, American Sociological Association (2008)
Climate change is already detrimentally affecting the lives and health of many people (Houghton et...
Other
Poisoned Land: The Science and Politics of the Oklahoma Buyouts (2008)
The world’s most rapidly increasing population of refugees is the group displaced by environmental disaster...