Shannon E. Bell, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Virginia Tech
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I am an environmental sociologist and Appalachian studies scholar. My research and teaching focus on forest-based traditions and lifeways in Central Appalachia, the socio-ecological impacts of fossil fuel extraction and transport on rural communities, and just energy transitions. I am author of two award-winning books (Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice and Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. My scholarship has received awards from national and international professional societies, including the Rural Sociological Society, the American Sociological Association, the Association for Humanist Sociology, and the Society for Human Ecology. I have conducted extensive research in Central Appalachian communities, including my most recent projects, which include an ethnography of Appalachian wild harvesting traditions and economies, an examination of inequities in the Appalachian wild-harvested herbal supply chain, and leading the creation of the Forest Botanicals Region Living Monument, which celebrates the historical and present-day relationships and traditions that a diversity of Appalachian peoples have long held with the medicinal herbs and wild foods of the Appalachian forest understory.
View my curriculum vitae.
Books
Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice
Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice
Published by University of Illinois Press in 2013
Winner of the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award
Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being. Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--a number of them illustrated by the women's "photostories"--describe obstacles, losses, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism.
Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia
Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia
Published by The MIT Press in 2016
Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award
Winner of the Society for Human Ecology's Gerald L. Young Book Award
In the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia, mountaintop-removal mining and coal-industry-related flooding, water contamination, and illness have led to the emergence of a grassroots, women-driven environmental justice movement. But the number of local activists is small relative to the affected population, and recruiting movement participants from within the region is an ongoing challenge. In Fighting King Coal, Bell examines an understudied puzzle within social movement theory: why so few of the many people who suffer from industry-produced environmental hazards and pollution rise up to participate in social movements aimed at bringing about social justice and industry accountability. Using the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia as a case study, Bell investigates the challenges of micromobilization through in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis, geospatial viewshed analysis, and an eight-month “Photovoice” project—an innovative means of studying, in real time, the social dynamics affecting activist involvement in the region. Bell reveals the importance of local identities to the success or failure of local recruitment efforts in social movement struggles, ultimately arguing that, if the local identities of environmental justice movements are lost, the movements may also lose their power.
Current Projects
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