Stephanie Malin

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Colorado State University
Stephanie is a sociologist of environment, globalization, and development, focusing on community-level outcomes of natural resource development. Her main interests include environmental justice, environmental health, social mobilization, poverty, and political economy of energy development. Stephanie examines how these variables intersect in rural communities across the American West and Northeast.

During her time as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University, Stephanie began the Natural Resource Research Group to facilitate collaborative research examining impacts of hydraulic fracturing and farmers' decisions to sign leases allowing natural gas drilling on their land. Her research into unconventional oil and gas production's social and environmental justice impacts continues in Colorado, as does her research on uranium production.

Stephanie's book The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice (published by Rutgers University Press, May 2015) explores how under-addressed legacies of uranium development intersect with current efforts to renew uranium production as part of the nuclear fuel cycle, specifically with the recent permitting of the Pion Ridge Uranium Mill in southwestern Colorado. Stephanie asks whether nuclear power provides a socially sustainable solution in the age of climate change mitigation. Her publications include: When is 'Yes to the Mill!' Environmental Justice?: Interrogating Sites of Acceptance to Energy Development, in Analyse & Kritik's special issue on Environmental Justice; There's No Real Choice but to Sign: Neoliberalization and Normalization of Hydraulic Fracturing on Pennsylvania Farmland in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences; Left in the Dust: Uranium's Legacy and the Victims of Mill Tailings Exposure in Monticello, Utah in Society and Natural Resources, which examined uranium's environmental legacy on the Colorado Plateau; and Community Development among Toxic Tailings: An Interactional Case Study of Community Health and Extralocal Institutions, which examines interactions between grassroots movements, public institutions, and public health. Stephanie's courses include Environmental Justice, Society & Environment, and Water, Society, & Environment. At Brown, she taught graduate seminars in Natural Resources Sociology and Environment, Human Health, and Public Policy.

Stephanie is thrilled to be a part of the Department of Sociology at CSU and looks forward to continuing her research on energy development! Her current fieldwork includes a two-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences branch, which utilizes a quasi-experimental design to compare quality of life and stress outcomes related to living in close proximity to unconventional oil and gas production activities. Stephanie recently completed a one-year Water Center Faculty Fellowship project, where she examined interrelationships between unconventional oil and gas production, water rights, and water markets in northern Colorado. She also has on-going projects examining uranium development and the intersections between agriculture and energy development.