The Social Ecology of Substance Use and Misuse
PI: Brian King, co-PIs: Louisa Holmes, Selena Ortiz, Narmadha Senanayake, Andrea Rishworth
Since the increasing availability of illegally produced opioids in the early 1990’s, the United States rural Appalachia region has become the epicenter of the opioid crisis. The combination of deindustrialization, agrarian and energy economies, geographic isolation and a lack of social networks have devastated communities across the region, producing historically mediated and spatially differentiated landscapes of addiction. This research evaluates how the changing economic, institutional and environmental processes in rural Appalachia combine to produce landscapes of addiction; how prescription, addiction and treatment rates vary within and across rural Appalachia and what specific factors contribute to these variations; and how rates of prescription, addiction and treatment differ by social group. This work contends that attending to the underlying social ecology of addiction is critical to understand how economic, institutional and environmental factors intersect to produce landscapes of addiction.
NSF CAREER Grant: Political Ecologies of Health: Coupling Livelihood and Environment Responses to HIV/AIDS
$485,292, September 1, 2011 – August 31, 2017, GSS 1056683
PI: Brian King
This work evaluates the relationships between health and environment, focusing in particular on the effects of HIV/AIDS upon social and environmental systems. This CAREER program is conducting intensive research in South Africa working in close collaboration with research institutes and governmental agencies to examine how livelihood systems adjust in response to HIV/AIDS, how livelihood responses to HIV/AIDS rework access patterns and the rules governing resource use, and whether intra-household and intra-community variations shape livelihood responses to HIV/AIDS. This work asserts that attending to health-environment interactions is needed to understand how disease results in transformations to social and environmental systems, and how these systems in turn shape the trajectories of disease and the possibilities for sustainable disease management.
Recent articles covering this research include: Apartheid’s Lingering Effects for HIV/AIDS
Research Experiences for Undergraduates: Political Ecologies of Health: Coupling Livelihood and Environment Responses to HIV/AIDS
$7,480, 2014, BCS/GSS 1433940 (with Marina Burka)
$7,480, 2013, BCS/GSS 1331960 ( with Evan Gover)
NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research: Chronic Kidney Disease, Environmental Risk and the Transformation of Agrarian Landscapes and Livelihoods
$16,000, September 1, 2016 – August 31, 2018, 1633991
PI: Narmadha Senanayake, co-PI: Brian King
Since the first reports of the emergence of a new form of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKDu) in the early 1990s, Sri Lanka’s once peripheral dry zone has become the epicenter of an epidemic that is slowly crippling agricultural communities across the island’s rice belt. This project focuses on three dimensions of the relationship between CKDu and agricultural practices to explain how this scientifically contested illness is remade into an agricultural problem, and with what effects. First, the project investigates how ideas about the environment and its links to disease are formed, reinforced, and circulated. Second, it evaluates how farmers’ cultivation practices are changing in response to the problem of CKDu and documents their shifts to native rice varieties and also to organic – or chemical free – systems of production, albeit in spatially uneven and sometimes transitory ways. Additionally, this study investigates how uncertainty about CKDu’s cause mediates farmers’ interactions with the environment and shapes the uneven adoption of native seeds as disease management strategies. Finally, the project examines how relationships between health and agricultural modernization in the dry zone have changed over time and inform contemporary agrarian shifts in response to CKDu. The project integrates archival research, ethnographic methods, and household surveys to study two dry zone farming communities. Findings of this research will provide insights into how contested agri-environmental-health problems shape practices of disease management and give rise to new forms of agricultural production. While this research is anchored in an analysis of shifting agrarian livelihoods in CKDu endemic areas of Sri Lanka, its findings will be applicable to other geographic regions where parallel epidemics of mystery kidney disease are found in agricultural communities such as India, Egypt, and Central America.
Recent articles covering this research include: “Health-Environment Futures: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Bodies” and “Field Report: Mystery Kidney Disease and Agrarian Transformation in Dry Zone Sri Lanka”
NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research: Workers’ Perception of Workplace Health Risk Exposure: Crystalline Silica in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Industry
$11,012, September 1, 2014 – March 31, 2017, 1434222
PI: Arielle Hesse, co-PI: Brian King
This project provides empirical analysis of the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and governance mechanisms for occupational health in the US. The combination of extractive technologies in the oil and gas industry in the mid-2000s reshaped energy landscapes in the US around the production of unconventional fossil fuels. The subcontracted structure of the hydraulic fracturing industry, combined with its industrial-scale equipment and use of materials raised significant occupational health concerns for public health scientists, government officials, industry, and workers. A key concern was workers’ exposure to silica dust. Silica is a carcinogen, and exposure to silica can also result in the respiratory disease silicosis.
The project examined three governance mechanisms pertinent to silica and the hydraulic fracturing industry: 1) rulemaking, 2) enforcement of standards through inspections, and 3) workers’ compensation disease statutes. The research that was conducted was primarily qualitative. It included interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis primarily in Pennsylvania, a state with significant hydraulic fracturing activity, but also Texas, Ohio, West Virginia, and Washington D.C.
This project has forwarded scholarly knowledge by providing empirical evidence regarding the impact of the hydraulic fracturing industry’s spatial patterns and flexible work on occupational health governance, and theoretically by advancing feminist critiques of the ways responsibility emerges through governance. Governance mechanisms to protect workers from silica exposure make certain actors (workers, the state, and employers) responsible for occupational health outcomes. Significantly, while governance mechanisms in theory shift responsibility for occupational health to the state and to industry, in practice, these mechanisms ultimately reaffirm workers’ as the agent most responsible for maintaining safe and healthful work activities. Many of these failures result from the two entities that constitute the states’ interest in health—namely that of workers and of industry.
Recent articles covering this research include: Hesse, A. (2017). Governance at the intersection of health and energy. In Handbook on Geographies of Energy, B. Solomon and K. Calvert (eds.). Edward Elgar Publishing.