Thomas D. Beamish

Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis

I am a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, a research affiliate at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), and currently a board member and a faculty affiliate of the UC Davis Designated Emphasis in Environmental Humanities. My research interests and expertise focus on risks & hazards, the environment, community politics & movements, and institutions, organizations, & economy. These interests have taken shape through studies of mass media and the anti-war movements, the petroleum industry and an oil spill disaster, technological innovation in the commercial construction and real estate industries, risk disputes and civic political conflict, and the political discourse and theatre that currently surrounds "public tragedies." Across my career, within these broad areas of interest, I have focused on the collective construction of rationality and how situated membership(s) in organizations, communities, and social movement groups shape interpretation, expectations, and preferences in significant ways.

The National Science Foundation, the California Energy Commission, the UC Toxics Research and Teaching Fellowship, and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation are just some of the institutions that have funded my research. From my research, I have published three books, Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis (2002, MIT Press), Community at Risk: Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security (2015, Stanford University Press), and After Tragedy Strikes: Why Claims of Trauma and Loss Promote Public Outrage and Encourage Political Polarization (2024, University of California Press). I have also published in leading journals like The Journal of Social Problems, Annual Review of Sociology, The American Behavioral Scientist, Environment & Planning C: Government & Policy, and Organization and Environment, among others.