Professor Liévanos earned his A.A. in Liberal Arts from Allan Hancock College (2002); his B.A. in Sociology from Fresno State University (2004); and his M.A. in Sociology (2007), graduate certification in Air Quality and Health (2010), and Ph.D. in Sociology (2013) at the University of California, Davis. Previously, he lectured in the Center for Public Policy and in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University (2011-2013), and he was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington State University (2013-2016). He was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon (UO) from 2016-2020 before promotion to Associate of Sociology (2020-present). At UO, he is also a participating faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program (2017-present) and on the graduate faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (2020-present). He maintains a regional affiliation with the University of Washington Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (2014-present). His professional service has included various editorial duties for Sociological Perspectives, Environmental Sociology, and the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. For the the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Environmental Sociology (SES) he has served as a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Racial Equity (2017-2021) and elected chair of the Membership Committee (2019-2021). In May 2023, he was elected Chair-Elect of the ASA SES for a 3-year-term that will span positions of Chair-Elect, Chair, and Past-Chair for the section.

His research focuses primarily on the organizational, institutional, demographic, and spatial dynamics of environmental and housing market inequalities and on the social movements and policy processes that attempt to address such inequalities in the United States. These interests are reflected in his ongoing projects on (1) relational and intersectional approaches to studying various forms of inequality, (2) cumulative pollution burden, (3) energy injustice and unequal resilience in the electrical grid, and (4) the political and technoscientific aspects of environmental justice policy development and implementation. His general interests are also evident in a string of publications from 2020-2023 on "riskscapes," "racialized crisis driven urbanization," and "racialized hazardous space" that constitute his new "critical race urban-environmental sociology" approach.

You can learn more about Professor Liévanos's background and work at the UO by clicking here for a summer 2021 Oregon Quarterly story about him and by clicking here for a spring 2022 UO Today interview with him, conducted by Paul Peppis, Director of the UO Oregon Humanities Center.