Raoul Lievanos

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). In 2024, Professor Liévanos was appointed as Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) for UO Sociology and coordinator of the Sociology Honors Program, Peer Leadership Program, and Internship Credits. In spring 2025, he was a recipient of the UO Center for Undergraduate Research and Engagement Faculty Research Mentor Award for his mentorship of Sociology Honors Students' thesis research projects - the majority of which were featured in the spring 2025 UO Undergraduate Research Symposium. 

Professor Liévanos's recent service activities span professional, governmental, and university contexts. In the professional realm, he held editorial positions 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 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 for a 3-year-term that spanned positions of Chair-Elect (2023-2024) and coordinator of the ASA SES 2024 Annual Meeting Program, Chair (2024-2025), and Past-Chair (2025-2026) for the ASA SES. As SES Chair, he led bylaw revisions that institutionalized the section's new mentoring program for graduate students and junior scholars. From 2023-2024, Professor Liévanos also served as a merit reviewer for environmental justice, labor, and community benefits components of applications to the U.S. Department of Energy's Long-Duration Energy Storage Program and 48(c) Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credit Program. In addition, from 2023-2025, he served as College of Arts and Sciences Social Science Representative and Executive Committee Member for the UO Senate, where he co-led and/or co-sponsored resolutions to support (1) UO graduate students' demands for fairer and more dignified compensation; (2) the creation of a UO Hispanic Serving Institution Steering Committee; (3) principles of shared governance, inclusion, and freedoms of speech, assembly, and academic inquiry; and (4) a strategic plan for protecting immigrant, international, and noncitizen UO community members. 

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 and current book project 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.