Caleb Scoville

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University and a 2025-26 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. I study the politics of environmental knowledge and the dynamics of environmental controversies.

In my research, I seek to understand the power relations under which environmental knowledge is produced, the political consequences of new interventions into the nonhuman environment, and how technical, scientific, legal and political conceptions of nature interact in the context of social conflict and environmental change. Right now, I am particularly focused on the historical dynamics of anti-environmentalism, and the relationship between what we know about nature and our instrumental uses of it. My published work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Science, and Theory and Society, among other venues.

My current book project, Stupid Little Fish: Extraction, Conservation, and the Politics of Environmental Decline (under advance contract with Columbia University Press) is a deep dive into the case of the Delta Smelt, a small endangered species of fish caught in the center of California's so-called "water wars" that subsequently became enrolled in the USA's partisan culture wars. Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic evidence, and systematically analyzed media data, the project "follows the fish" through the (often ironic) entanglements of extractive infrastructure, science, law, electoral politics, and the public sphere. It offers a new theoretical framework for analyzing conflicts over natural resources that centers on how attempts to control and define nature originating in one domain of social life overflow into others, triggering a chain of subsequent interventions that shape the terms of future environmental conflict. This work is supported by an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship and has received awards and honorable mentions from the American Sociological Association's sections on Theory, Environmental Sociology, Science Knowledge and Technology, Sociology of Law, and Animals and Society, as well as the Pacific Sociological Association and the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Sociology, where I completed my doctorate in 2020.

At Tufts, my research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Faculty Research Awards Committee, the Climate, Renewable Energy, Agriculture, Technology, and Ecology (CREATE) Solutions initiative, a Neubauer Faculty Fellowship, and a Bernstein Faculty Fellowship. During my graduate studies at Berkeley, I held fellowships sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law & Society, the Institute of Governmental Studies, the Center for Technology, Society & Policy, and the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group.

I am currently engaged in several collaborative research projects, including work on the environmental justice implications of the rise of data-driven and algorithmic approaches to natural resource conservation, and another on the politics of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am continuing my work on California water politics, most recently with a focus on the relationships among infrastructure failure, policy change, climate change, and land fallowing.

I am now laying the groundwork for a second book-length project, tentatively titled, Divided by Nature: How Environmental Politics Became Partisan and What to Do About It in a Warming World. This project (which will also result in a series of peer-reviewed articles) is supported by an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and much of this research is being done in collaboration with Andrew McCumber.

I teach Environmental Sociology and Social Theory at Tufts University. I am also a faculty affiliate with the Environmental Studies Program at Tufts, and an affiliated scholar with the Climate Social Science Network at the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society. From 2020 to 2022, I was an affiliate of the Research Cluste …