PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

Communities around the United States face the threat of being underwater. This is not only a matter of rising waters reaching our doorsteps. It is also the threat of being financially underwater: with families struggling to insure their homes and property values collapsing as risks change, areas may become economically uninhabitable before they are physically unlivable. Underwater is a sociological account of how and with what effects floods are transformed into an economic problem facing families, communities, and governments. The book provides an in-depth account of the politics and social impacts of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP): the controversial federal program at the center of this transformation. The NFIP provides flood insurance protection for virtually all homes and small businesses in the country. In doing so, it turns a changing risk into an immediate economic reality: a set of costs that have to be assessed, distributed, and managed. It is the institution that will shape who lives on the waterfront, on what terms and at what cost, as the U.S. faces a climate-changed future.

Underwater examines the NFIP as both the stakes and terrain of political and moral struggles over how Americans live with the costs of floods — and the problem of loss that climate change represents. Drawing on archival, interview, ethnographic, and other documentary data, the book follows these struggles over time, from the NFIP’s establishment in 1968 to the present, and at multiple scales, from local-level backlash to new flood maps and insurance prices, to national-level Congressional debates. It complicates easy stories about the program’s failures, which take the economization of natural hazard risk for granted and imply technical fixes to insurance contracts and prices. Instead, Underwater shows that insurance generally, and the NFIP specifically, forms a material constitution for society, delimiting risks and responsibilities through the design and operation of its seemingly arcane risk instruments, terms and conditions, and pricing arrangements. Though positioned as a rational solution for managing risk, flood insurance has ignited recurring fights over what is fair and valuable, raising new questions about how to plan for a future shaped by climate change. It provides a window into emerging moral economies of climate change. With its attention to the contested economic dimensions of environmental risk, Underwater uncovers the difficulties of living in, and using insurance to govern, the nation’s increasingly vulnerable floodplains.

ARTICLES and book chapters

2024. “The Sociology of Property Value in a Climate-Changed United States.” Social Problems.

2024. With Sandeep Poudel, Richard Anyah, Zbigniew Grabowski, and James Knighton. “Differential flood insurance participation and housing market trajectories under future coastal flooding in the United States.” Communications Earth & Environment.

2024. With Max Besbris, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Ruthy Gourevitch. “The housing regime as a barrier to climate action.” npj Climate Action.

2024. “The state and the state-of-the-art: prefiguring private insurance for US flood risk.” Socio-Economic Review.

2023. With Sandeep Poudel, Connor Caridad, and James Knighton. “Housing market dynamics of the post-sandy Hudson Estuary, Long Island sound, and New Jersey coastline are explained by NFIP participation.” Environmental Research Letters.

2022. “Stopping the flow: The aspirational elimination of flood insurance cross-subsidies in the United States and the United Kingdom.” In Climate, Society and Elemental Insurance: Capacities and Limitations, edited by Kate Booth, Chloe Lucas, Shaun French. Routledge.

2022. “Moral Entanglements with a Changing Climate.” Theory and Society.

2022. “The ‘Boomer Remover’: Intergenerational Discounting, Climate Change and the Coronavirus.” The Sociological Review 70(1): 74–91.

2021. With Ryan Hagen. “Disasters, Continuity, and the Pathological Normal.” Sociologica 15(1): 1-9.

2021. “Plan B: The Collapse of Public-Private Risk Sharing in the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program.” In Critical Disaster Studies: New Perspectives on Disaster, Risk, Vulnerability, and Resilience, edited by Jacob A.C. Remes and Andy Horowitz. University of Pennsylvania Press.

2021. With James O. Knighton, Kelly Hondula, Cielo Sharkus, and Christian Guzman. “Flood risk behaviors of US riverine metropolitan areas are driven by local hydrology and shaped by race.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (13) e2016839118.

2021. With Stephen J. Collier and Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen. “Climate change and insurance.” Economy and Society.

2021. “Insurance and the temporality of climate ethics: Accounting for climate change in US flood insurance.” Economy and Society.

2020. With James Knighton, Brian Buchanan, Christian Guzman, Eric White and Brian Rahmf. “Predicting flood insurance claims with hydrologic and socioeconomic demographics via machine learning: Exploring the roles of topography, minority populations, and political dissimilarity.” Journal of Environmental Management 272: 111051.

2019. "‘Scarier than another storm’: Values at risk in the mapping and insuring of U.S. floodplains." British Journal of Sociology 70(3): 1067-1090.

2018. “The Sociology of Climate Change as a Sociology of Loss.” European Journal of Sociology 59(3): 301-337. Winner, 2019 Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award, American Sociological Association Section on Environmental Sociology.

2018. With James O. Knighton, Osamu Tsuda, and M. Todd Walter. "Challenges to Implementing Bottom-Up Flood Risk Decision Analysis Frameworks: How Strong are Social Networks of Flooding Professionals?" Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 22: 5657-5673.

2017. "Gender and Green Consumption: Relational, Practical, Material." Journal of Consumer Ethics 1(2): 92-99.

2017. "Who Pays for the Next Wave? The American Welfare State and Responsibility for Flood Risk." Politics & Society 45(3): 415-440.

2013. “The taste for green: The possibilities and dynamics of status differentiation through “green” consumption.” Poetics 41(3): 294-322.

2010. "Contesting the Spectacle: Global Lives as Counterpublic in the Context of Celebrity Activism." Cultural Analysis 9: 146-151.