Rebecca Scott

Rebecca Scott is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, with affiliate faculty status in the Geography Department since January 1, 2020. Her appointment in Geography reflects the strong interdisciplinary connections between her sociological work and geographical approaches to environmental issues, particularly environmental justice and resource extraction in Appalachian regions.

Dr. Scott earned her Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2007. Her academic trajectory has focused on the complex intersections of environment, identity, and social inequality, with particular attention to how landscapes become sites where identities are formed and contested.

Scott's research examines environmental inequality through critical lenses of gender, race, and class, with special emphasis on how these categories shape experiences of environmental change and resource extraction. Her work combines cultural studies, feminist theory, and environmental sociology to understand the relationships between people, places, and environmental transformation. She investigates how fossil fuel extraction reshapes social relations, identities, and communities, particularly in Appalachia where she has conducted extensive ethnographic research.

Her publications reveal a consistent focus on environmental justice issues, with particular attention to mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, and pipeline development. Scott analyzes how these extractive practices transform not only physical landscapes but also social identities and community structures, examining the intersections of environmental change with racialization, gender construction, and class formation.

Dr. Scott's research has been supported by multiple System-Wide Research Board Grants from the University of Missouri, including funding for projects on fracking ('Unreal Estates: Fracking Nature, Property and Personhood,' 2018) and Appalachian identity ('Extracting Identities: Nature, Race, and Gender in the WV Coalfields,' 2009). She has also received a Summer Research Fellowship and Research Council Grant from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2008, and was awarded the Feminist Studies Award in 2006 for her work on masculinity in mountaintop removal discourse.

Currently, Scott is working on a book centered on fracking and the pipeline boom, with a particular focus on property as a technology of personhood and exploitation. This work extends her longstanding interest in how environmental changes reshape social relations and identities, examining the complex ways that property relations mediate experiences of extraction and environmental transformation.