Alan Rudy Central Michigan University, USA
Alan Rudy is a critical scholar and demanding teacher, currently an Associate Professor of Sociology, and member of the Honors and Environmental Studies faculty, at Central Michigan University. His bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College was in Biology and this served him well during his MA and PhD in Sociology, at UC Santa Cruz, specializing in the Political Economy of Agriculture, Environmental Sociology and Science and Technology Studies. His primary teaching responsibility is in Sociological Theory, with courses on social movements, environmental crises, politics, science and technology, and pop culture in uncertain rotation. His research has focused on integrative regional studies and the neoliberalization of the university in the past but his long-time focus on environmental social theory recently culminating in a co-authored book, Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity (Palgrave: 2015), with Damian White (RISD) and Brian Gareau (BC). His next projects include a critical re-appraisal of Jim O’Connor’s second contradiction thesis and reworking his dissertation on California’s Imperial Valley in light of the theoretical work in the book mentioned above.
