Isabella Clark is an environmental sociologist who uses ethnographically embedded interview methods to understand the intersections between culture, relationships, and health justice. Her research and teaching interests coalesce around the environment, health, gender, Marxism, settler colonialism, the body, and emotions.
Her most recent project was an ethnographically embedded interview study on multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a contested environmental illness. One thread of this project examined how people with this condition transform chemicals into a relational problem and how this changes their interpersonal relationships. A second thread looked at the vast amounts of socially reproductive labor displaced onto individuals who suffer from MCS. For more on this work, see her interview on the recent episode of The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast, "The Physical and Emotional Labor of MCS" as well as her publication in Social Sciences, “When Avoiding Chemicals Means Avoiding Others: Relational Exposures and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.”
Her other research projects also revolve around environmental and health justice, analyzing how the ways people interpret cultural and scientific meanings about the environment, health, and the body relate to social location and can further social inequality. This includes a publication on people going childfree because of climate change, an ongoing collaboration around masculinity and health practices in Silicon Valley, and a project on the beauty industry and environmental injustice.
She is currently teaching three courses at CC:
EV145 Environment and Society
EV260 Topics in Environmental Social Sciences: Our Bodies, Our Environments: Deconstructing Health
EV360 Advanced Topics in Environmental Social Sciences: Environmental Injustice and Community Resistance
