ENSP Faculty Profile: Brent Kaup, Environmental Sociology

Our newest ENSP faculty member is Assistant Professor of Sociology Dr. Brent Kaup. Dr. Kaup studies how changing patterns of capital accumulation intersect with human uses and perceptions of nature. He examines the financial, material, and geopolitical factors that drive global increases in natural resource extraction and the effects such increases have upon power, autonomy, and resistance.

The broader impetus driving Dr. Kaup’s work is to study, and potentially resolve, contemporary social and environmental problems. His most extensive work to date examines the socioeconomic and ecological challenges faced by the Bolivian state and its people as both have attempted to enhance their power and autonomy in a globally interdependent economy. In particular, Dr. Kaup has examined the struggles between the Bolivian state, its social movements, and trans-national energy firms to control—and reap the benefits from—the oil and natural gas reserves that lie beneath the country’s soil.

More recently, Dr. Kaup has begun work on two new projects. In the first, Dr. Kaup is seeking to explain what drives changes in the markets of energy-producing natural resources by analyzing the struggles of trans-national energy firms, energy producing regions, and energy demanding regions to incorporate different sources of fuel into the global energy market. He intends to determine how these actors have worked and are working to restructure the political, economic, material, and environmental regulations governing the extraction, transport, and use of energy producing natural resources throughout the globe.

For his second new project, Dr. Kaup intends to complete a study of the privatization of garbage. Over the past twenty-five years, garbage collection has increasingly changed from a public provision to a private service. During this time, the garbage industry has become more consolidated and the size of dumps has dramatically increased. Through this project, Dr. Kaup will explore how the privatization of garbage collection, the consolidation of the garbage industry, and birth of mega-landfills have affected the people and places who are “down in the dumps” at the end of the trash commodity chain.

Dr. Kaup joined the College of William & Mary in August 2009 after completing his doctoral studies in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he also received his Master’s degree. Prior to pursuing his graduate studies, Dr. Kaup was based in Eugene, Oregon where received his Bachelor’s degree in History and Sociology. While in Oregon, Dr. Kaup developed a fondness for the outdoors and everything green—things he now finds in abundance just outside his own front door. There, he is often found pondering how many invasive species he has in his yard and whether or not the native mosses can win the struggle against exotic plants in nature’s survival of the fittest. Clearly, Dr. Kaup is a worthy addition to our interdisciplinary environmental science and policy program!