Department of Sociology
Rebecca Scott
Assistant Professor
I received my PhD, with a parenthetical notation in Feminist Studies, in 2007 from the University of California-Santa Cruz. My research and teaching interests include gender, race and class formations, cultural studies, environmental inequality, nature and society, and feminist ethnography.
My current project concerns the cultural context of various transformations in the coal industry in southern West Virginia, particularly mountaintop removal coal mining. I have focused on questions of how identity formations such as whiteness, masculinity, and different class cultures intersect with Appalachian regional marginalization and national political culture to generate the conditions of possibility for environmentally destructive practices, as well as for environmental justice and labor activism.
I am also working on a collaborative project on the 'branding' of natural resource extraction with Elizabeth Bennett (University of California-Santa Cruz), comparing the public relation practices of West Virginia's largest coal producer with the major logging company in Northern California. This project focuses on the narratives of place and belonging that are mobilized and elided by these companies' public relations campaigns in the course of important structural transformations in each industry, and on how these campaigns are experienced by working communities.
My other long-term project will examine childbirth as a site of subject formation, particularly through class-inflected and racialized constructions of femininity and masculinity. This project continues my investigation of the cultural context of political consciousness; in this case, I am interested in the feminist movement’s politicization of medicalized childbirth and the homebirth movement, and in the apparently increasing popularity of technological interventions in birth. I am interested in how childbirth practices are influencing people’s conceptions of the roles of mothers and fathers and medical practitioners, as well as masculinity, femininity, and the human relationship to nature.
Scott, Rebecca R. 2007. “Dependent Masculinity and Political Culture in Pro-Mountaintop Removal Discourse.” Forthcoming in Feminist Studies, Fall 2007.
Scott, Rebecca R. “Coal Heritage/Coal History: Appalachia, America, and Mountaintop Removal.” Forthcoming in Affecting Nations, edited by Herman Gray and Macarena Gómez-Barris.
312 Middlebush Hall
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211-6100
(573) 882-8331
Fax: (573) 884-6430