Raoul S. Lievanos

Raoul S. Liévanos

Research Fellow

Raoul S. Liévanos holds graduate degrees and advanced certification from the University of California (UC) in sociology, air quality and health, environmental policy, and spatial pattern analysis. Liévanos is scheduled to complete his PhD in sociology from UC Davis in 2013. His research while at UC Davis has illuminated how and why the meaning of “environmental justice,” as articulated by advocates, transformed as it was institutionalized into regulatory policy with implications for the future of environmental justice advocacy and regulatory scientific practice in California. Liévanos’s multi-method dissertation explores the spatial concentration of, and collective response to, risks of exposure to toxic contamination, climate-related disaster, and home foreclosure in low-income and nonwhite neighborhoods in the Stockton, California metropolitan area. This research uses Stockton as a case to empirically document and theorize how all of these dynamics unfolding in Stockton comprise the “new urban-environmental crisis” facing the contemporary American metropolis. Liévanos began his affiliation with the CHF as a Research Fellow in spring 2011 and is currently conducting archival research and spatial analysis for the Exposed Communities-Ambler Project. He is also an instructor in the Department of Culture and Communication and Center for Public Policy at Drexel University.

  Download curriculum vitae

Select Publications

  • Lievanos, Raoul S., Jonathan K. London, and Julie Sze. 2011. "Uneven Transformations and Environmental Justice: Regulatory Science, Street Science, and Pesticide Regulation in California." Pp. 201-228 in Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement, edited by G. Ottinger and B. R. Cohen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Shilling, Fraser, Jonathan K. London, and Raoul S. Lievanos. 2009. "Marginalization by Collaboration: Environmental Justice as a Third Party in and beyond CALFED." Environmental Science and Policy 12(6): 694-709.
  • London, Jonathan K., Julie Sze, and Raoul S. Lievanos. 2008. "Problems, Promise, Progress, and Perils: Critical Reflections on Environmental Justice Policy Implementation in California." UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 26(2): 255-289.

Select Presentations

  • “Between Philly, Ambler, and a Hard Place: Grids, Flows and Competing Place Narratives in Toxic Remediation.” Presenter with Jody Roberts (Chemical Heritage Foundation), November 5, 2011, in the Narratives of Place in Communities of Exposure and Disaster Panel at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Cleveland, Ohio.
  • “‘Policy-Relevant Knowledge,’ Differential Cooptation, and the Institutionalization of Environmental Justice in California.” Presenter, February 26, 2011, in the Multidimensional Perspectives on Social Movements regular paper session at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  • “‘A Minority Perspective is Limited’: Environmental Privilege and Surface Water Hazards in an Impaired Estuary.” Presenter, April 18, 2010, in the Critical Geographies of Race and Critical Race Theory III: Environmental and Everyday Racisms session at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC.
E-mail Print Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Fellowships at CHF


CHF’s scholars, who spend anywhere from one to nine months in residence, form a vital part of CHF’s intellectual life.

Historically Grounded Perspectives

The Center for Contemporary History and Policy explores issues ranging from energy to medicine on CHF's blog, Periodic Tabloid.