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This paper explores the connections between two seemingly disparate cases of socioenvironmental injustice: Flint's water crisis in Michigan, USA, and Union Carbide's toxic chemical release in Bhopal, India. Engaging our empirical and theoretical insights from these two cases, this paper illustrates how marginalized people in distant settings can face similar socioenvironmental struggles. Considering Bhopal and Flint as instances of slow violence and institutional betrayal, the article makes two key arguments. First, treating these crises as discrete events obscures their sustained assault on people deemed expendable by their governments. Second, institutions charged with protecting people in distress can magnify and extend suffering. The paper analyzes institutional betrayal as a mechanism of slow violence: survivors can suffer lingering consequences when seeking restitution from regulatory bodies that may be responsible or complicit. We find that government responses and denials have caused prolonged violence in these regions. The paper concludes by urging scholars to compare socioenvironmental injustice globally, to believe residents, and to reject false end dates for crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how structural and social-psychological factors combine to motivate urban environmental activism. Specifically, we argue that residents' everyday perceptions about environmental, social, and political conditions in their neighborhoods and cities are connected to their likelihood of involvement in environmental collective action. We use logistic regression models and original survey data from the 2021 Cook County Community Survey (n = 1,069) to investigate whether urban residents' perceptions of the conditions where they live are associated with their likelihood of participating in protests or public meetings around environmental issues. Our findings show that, in the context of the Chicago metropolitan area, residents who perceive worse environmental conditions in their communities, feel a greater sense of belonging to their neighborhoods, and feel they understand local politics and have political power are more likely to mobilize. In contrast, those who are pessimistic about the future of their neighborhoods are less likely to act. The study suggests that participation in urban environmental collective action is partly explained by how people interpret the daily surroundings they routinely navigate and experience where they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how has China covered the Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement with emerging themes closely related to its domestic issues? To what extent does the Chinese media build a unified discourse on sensitive themes that underpin the BLM? These are important questions given China's complicated history with ethnicity, race, and protests. This article argues that Chinese media uses BLM as a multi-faceted propaganda tool to foster cohesion at ideological level. NVivo-powered coding and thematic media analysis show that mainstream media, including official, semi-official and commercial media, and we-media do not present a uniform discourse on BLM. While they generally converge on criticism towards "protests" and "police" action, they display a nuanced "anti-US" and "Greater China" discourse. Moreover, the BLM coverage is used to undermine the US and strengthen by comparison the party-state's legitimacy. In the absence of a reflective discussion on race, racist undertones emerge in Chinese we-media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is among the most pressing problems of our time, yet it remains a marginal topic in sociology. This study draws on citation network analysis, qualitative coding, and computational text analysis of articles published between 2015 and 2020 in select journals in U.S. elite sociology, environmental sociology, and science and technology studies (STS) to better understand differences and similarities in how these (sub)fields approach—or ignore—climate change. We map the structural relations of the research on climate change in these (sub)fields and analyze patterns in the substantive and theoretical engagement with the topic. Building on our analysis, we conclude by suggesting potential paths for stimulating further climate change research at the intersection of environmental sociology and STS and to propose tentative strategies for researchers to bring climate change into the sociological mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, the debate regarding the presence of crosses and crucifixes in public places is long-standing and involves their detractors, supporters and defenders. Over time, these conflicting positions have gained media resonance, becoming a sociopolitical controversy that has led to lawsuits at various levels, including the European Court of Human Rights. In the social sphere, the issue has oscillated between the recognition of the universal value of religious symbols and advocacy for secularism, even in open spaces such as mountaintops. During the last few decades, several initiatives have been undertaken in the Italian Alps, driven by ecological concerns and opposition to the presence of crosses on the mountains. These initiatives have resulted in collective actions against the positioning and erection of crosses, and there have even been attempts to diversify the Italian peaks. By providing a historical overview of the Christianisation of Italian mountaintops and focusing on the mobilisation against the presence of crosses, this article contributes to the understanding of the role of such symbols in Italian public opinion, which is intertwined with the vitality of the Catholic Church and the sociopolitical implications of these initiatives. The research questions will investigate the process of legitimisation and delegitimisation of Christian symbols. The cross on the mountaintop serves as an example of culturalised religion, where this cultural object can become a "passive religious symbol," polarising claims for the defence of the natural environment and the sustainability of religion in the mountains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have highlighted the political, economic, and psychological factors in the debate over anthropogenic climate change—a hegemony approach—but have rarely focused on the stories and possibilities of people's transitions from climate change non‐believer to climate change believer. Based on publicly accessible narratives, this study examines the stories of those who have switched from non‐believer to believer—a narrative approach—and the dilemmas involved in those switches. Our investigation illuminates that a transition to climate change believer is a cultural and moral matter based on changing social relations of knowledge and what people regard as ignorable. We find that narratives of transition commonly describe interrelated shifts in three social relational factors: the narrator's notions of self, material reality, and justice. We term this contextualized transformative experience a relational rupture. Our narrative approach thus contextualizes climate change denialism within a person's web of social relations, not the hegemony of climate change communication alone. Moreover, we suggest that, since public debate and polarization on scientific topics such as climate change, vaccination, and COVID‐19 are socially situated, they may potentially be socially bridged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural landscapes are under increasing development pressure from utility‐scale solar (USS) energy facilities while public attitudes toward these facilities remain poorly documented and understood. This study explores whether opposition to USS in upstate New York is shaped at least in part by perceived rural burden—the idea that rural people and places are unfairly expected to provide new renewable energy in response to urban demand. We explore the idea of rural burden with measures of distributive injustice, procedural injustice, periphery identity, and place attachment. We use a survey (N = 421) of residents of western and northern New York, regions with substantial new and pending USS development. We find that 42 percent of residents oppose USS installations in or near their local communities, 14 percent neither support nor oppose, and 44 percent support. Perceived distributive and procedural injustice, along with place attachment have the strongest effect on opposition, while socio‐demographic attributes, political ideology, and climate change beliefs were insignificant. These findings suggest that opposition to large scale renewable energy development exemplifies a rural environmental justice concern justified for many by the perceived legacy of exploitation in natural resource development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production has reinvigorated US production while creating conflicts over governance and environmental injustices. Here, we focus on relationships among power, regulatory conflict, and procedural justice around UOG by examining the Colorado Oil and Gas Task Force (TF) and its decision‐making processes. Instead of statewide voting on UOG ballot measures, Colorado convened a 21‐member TF tasked with making regulatory recommendations. We draw on interviews, participant observation, and policy ethnography to examine: who sets the rules of the game, how players are chosen, and by whom. We ask the following questions: (1) How did TF members and other political actors exert state and institutional power, and how did that shape the structure, composition, processes, and outcomes of the TF?; (2) As a state‐created body, how did the TF and its internal processes disrupt or reinforce power relations favoring industry and fossil fuel development?; and (3) What were the procedural justice implications of TF processes? We advance scholarship on procedural justice by demonstrating how people operate at institutional scales to shape decision‐making structures, processes, and outcomes. We show how nonelected bodies can work as state interventions for industry, reinforcing industry power and procedural injustices rather than disrupting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on cornerstone traditions in historical sociology, as well as work in environmental sociology and political-economic sociology, we theorize and investigate with moderation analysis how and why national militaries shape the effect of economic growth on carbon pollution. Militaries exert a substantial influence on the production and consumption patterns of economies, and the environmental demands required to support their evolving infrastructure. As far-reaching and distinct characteristics of contemporary militarization, we suggest that both the size and capital intensiveness of the world's militaries enlarge the effect of economic growth on nations' carbon emissions. In particular, we posit that each increases the extent to which the other amplifies the effect of economic growth on carbon pollution. To test our arguments, we estimate longitudinal models of emissions for 106 nations from 1990 to 2016. Across various model specifications, robustness checks, a range of sensitivity analyses, and counterfactual analysis, the findings consistently support our propositions. Beyond advancing the environment and economic growth literature in sociology, this study makes significant contributions to sociological research on climate change and the climate crisis, and it underscores the importance of considering the military in scholarship across the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research related to uncertainty communication remains contradictory, with some authors providing arguments of why it should be communicated, whereas others arguing that we should not do so. Practically, though, the decision on whether or not to openly communicate uncertainties remains on the level of experts of a certain field. That is why, in this article we analyze the psychophysiological reaction of experts when exposed to uncertainty as well as their willingness to participate in decision-making procedures about nuclear decommissioning (a salient issue, in which many uncertainties prevail) and using a sample of N = 134 participants which are employees of nuclear-related institutions in Belgium (divided in 2 groups: familiar and unfamiliar with decommissioning). By using the Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT) and Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT), we study for the first time (1) whether communicating uncertainty influences participation intention directly and (2) whether this impact is mediated by emotional arousal. The method consists of an experimental design, combining a survey with psychophysiological measurement of emotional arousal. Results show that participation intention is directly influenced by attitudes toward participation, moral norm and time constraints, whereas familiarity with the topic of decommissioning influences participation intention indirectly, through attitude toward participation. Uncertainty communication, our main variable of interest, does not influence participation intention. It does influence, though, emotional arousal (concerning the public acceptance of the remaining radioactivity resulting from decommissioning), but it does not generate negative feelings such as anger or fear. Given that in the literature there is a debate on whether or not uncertainties should be communicated, the findings of this study imply that the concern that uncertainty communication leads to negative feelings should not be used as a reason not to communicate uncertainty anymore. Further implications and limitations are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utah's Heber Valley has experienced rapid and (relatively) sustained growth since the 1990s, in part due to being chosen as a host venue for the 2002 Winter Olympics. As conditions in the Valley changed by virtue of this growth, individuals had to redefine their relationship with their community at large, as well as what community means to them individually. As individuals integrate new conditions into their imagined communities, they are also required to imagine communities in ways they never have before. The community's story is rewritten simultaneously along with individuals' own stories. These changing stories are shaped and indicated by the reconstruction of residents' narratives about their community, i.e., their community stories. In this paper, we (1) explore how Heber Valley residents' narratives change as a result of preparing for, participating in, and recovering from the Olympics, (2) verify these findings using survey data gathered during the same time period, and (3) examine how changes in residents' narratives in Heber Valley impacted the subjective evaluation of community. To do so, we rely on longitudinal data gathered among principal communities in Heber Valley with additional data generated from a hermeneutic content analysis of archival data found in the area's community newspaper (The Wasatch Wave). Survey data were gathered once a year over a five-year period from February 1999 through February 2003, with additional waves gathered in February 2007, 2012, and 2018. Our results indicated that the community narratives did change as a result of the Olympics, our survey data verified these community changes over time, and changes in residents' community stories impacted survey responses when residents were asked about community sentiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The siren call of easy solutions to socio-agricultural problems is often studied as a reflection of anthropocentric ideologies espousing faith in human ingenuity to overcome, often with technological innovations, any hurdles thrown at us. This theme has been reflected especially strongly in my own research on pesticide resistance, with farmers continually referring to the necessity of an 'easy button' or 'silver bullet' (usually in the form of a new chemical herbicide) that will solve the extremely complex and multi-dimensional problem of resistance. Drawing on my own research experiences, I examine parallels between this trend and Dr. David Connor's 2022 Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society presidential address, in which he emphasized the need to move from mono-disciplinary research with the target of explicit knowledge to transdisciplinary research engaged in co-creation of knowledge. Just as farmers have sought the ease and rewards of an easy button, so academics have often focused on simplistic, explicit knowledge generation to the exclusion of messy, complex approaches to real world problems. However, just as with farmers, academics as individuals are not necessarily to blame; there are structures and contextual factors constraining available choices, as well as a growing reflexive consideration of what our priorities should be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Middle-class households typically search for housing with an eye to long-term residence and are able to maintain a high level of stability, but what happens when these households are forced to make mobility decisions after exposure to a disaster and subsequent residential displacement? Through longitudinal interviews with 59 households in a middle-class suburb of Houston that flooded during Hurricane Harvey, we found that residential mobility decisions—whether to stay and rebuild or move—were guided by households' durable plans about the future. The majority of households decided to remain and rebuild their homes, despite the ability to move and pressure from friends and family to relocate to less vulnerable places with similar amenities. The households that stayed had long-term plans to remain in their homes before the flood, while the small number who decided to move generally had well-defined plans to do so in the near future before the storm hit. Our findings reveal the role of plans in the residential decision-making of middle-class households and have implications for understanding post-disaster immobility at a time when middle-class households are increasingly exposed to environmental disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I conduct a nationwide investigation of the relationship that toxic industrial pollution and the facilities that produce it have with trust and civic engagement within communities. Data on pollution exposure come from the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators Geographic Microdata (RSEI-GM) and Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data sets for the years 1995 to 1999. Data on trust and civic engagement come from the 2000 restricted-access Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS). Statistical analyses provide strong support for Freudenburg and Jones' conceptualization of corrosive communities and indicate that exposures to more toxic air pollution associate negatively with various measures of trust, and that increased numbers of TRI facilities associate negatively with various measures of civic engagement. The implication is that exposure to toxic industrial air pollution and the facilities that produce it not only adversely affect the physical health of nearby communities, but also their social well-being and underlying capacities for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that citizens' support for environmental policies depends on their economic interest and the community that one lives in, has been debated extensively in the environmental attitudes literature. However, this literature has not differentiated between separate policy dimensions that concern measures that affect specific groups in different ways. This paper differentiates between a nature/agriculture dimension that divides those who prioritize the agrarian interest from those who prioritize the protection of nature and a climate/energy dimension that divides those who prioritize industrial interest from those who prioritize fighting climate change, using a new survey in the Netherlands (N = 11,327). This two‐dimensional model meets three criteria: scalability, validity, and utility. Scalability is shown by factor analysis and Mokken scaling. Validity is shown by regression analyses that show that whether one lives in a rural or an urban community predicts one's position on the nature/agriculture dimension and that one's financial security predicts one's position on the climate/energy dimension. The utility is shown by regression analyses where the two dimensions are used to predict voting behavior. The Green Party voters favor nature and climate protection, the Liberal Party voters have the opposite views, the Christian‐Democrats favor agricultural interests and the Freedom Party favor industrial interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few decades, the United States has experienced several related and significant societal trends—the transition of the energy system away from coal, the intensification of partisan polarization, and the rise of a populist right-wing political ideology, perhaps best exemplified by the election of Donald Trump. We build Gramling and Freudenberg's little-explored concept of "development channelization" to argue that nostalgic right-wing populism, grievances directed toward the federal government, and partisanship converge to potentially thwart efforts to transition and diversify rural economies. Populist nostalgia and blame are associated with support for expanding the collapsing coal industry but do not predict support for other types of development. There are patterns of partisan polarization in support for extractive industries and wind power, but many development options appear to be relatively nonpartisan. We discuss these findings in terms of populism, nostalgia, partisan polarization, and the potential for rural renewal in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the governance regimes of the United States and many other nations have increasingly devolved authority from central federal governments to substantially weaker state and local governments and even private industry. This trend produces uneven results for affected spaces and modes of governance. At the same time, industries have been re‐regulated under neoliberalization to maximize corporate profitability. Conterminous to the trend of neoliberal deregulation is the global energy transition. The U.S. energy system has shifted away from coal toward natural gas and has become the world's top producer of hydrocarbons due to the widespread deployment of drilling techniques that allow access to unconventional resources. We evaluate the ways that neoliberal governance structures can create uneven socio‐economic impacts from oil and gas development across U.S. states using a multi‐level modeling framework with random slopes and cross‐level interactions. We utilize a multi‐level state and county data set that covers 2000–2016 to examine different outcomes across scales and places. We find evidence that state political economies—reflected in the ideological composition of state legislatures as well as the political spending of the energy sector—condition the effects of oil and gas development on well‐being. These findings are discussed in reference to theories of neoliberalism, growth machine politics, energy boomtowns, and natural resource‐dependent communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radioactive waste management (RWM) is a complex challenge, spanning various timeframes and societal domains, ranging from the technical, to the social, political and economic. As such, it has also attracted substantial attention from the social sciences. This article reviews social scientific engagement with RWM over the past two decades (2000-2019), with a particular focus on how this literature has engaged with and can be positioned vis-a-vis the 'socio-technical' challenge posed by radioactive waste. Analyzing a total of 275 published articles, we identify and discuss three dominant strands of research that all relate to the issue of acceptance/acceptability of RWM in society, focusing respectively on 1) individual(ized) perceptions about risks, benefits and facility siting; 2) governance approaches; and 3) ethical and epistemological issues connected to RWM. While calls have been made for a socio-technical approach towards radioactive waste, we argue that the majority of social scientific engagement with RWM has focused on 'social' processes, thus reinforcing a divide between the 'social' and the 'technical' aspects of RWM. Overall, social scientists should engage in and would benefit from greater reflection on their engagement with RWM, and direct efforts towards moving beyond multi-disciplinarity towards interdisciplinary approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on legal repression shows how elites use criminal law to demobilize collective challenges, yet social control efforts based in civil law have received inadequate attention. In this study, we develop the concept of elite legal framing to examine how corporations deploy "soft" forms of repression within the civil justice system. Drawing on court, government, and media documents, we analyze a series of transnational civil litigation cases over pesticide exposure on Dole-contracted banana plantations in Nicaragua. Results highlight how the corporate defendants promoted a corruption narrative that diffused through the media and legal system to successfully discredit farmworker claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudden shocks to labor demand have sometimes been shown to increase local crime rates. We build on this literature by estimating the causal effect of labor‐intensive seasonal agricultural activity on crime. We analyze a unique data set that describes criminal activity and fruit, vegetable, and horticultural (FVH) employment by month and U.S. county from 1990 to 2016. We find that the FVH labor share is associated with reduced property and violent crime rates, and possibly the number of property crimes committed within county years. Examining heterogeneities based on ethnicity, labor‐intensive FVH activity decreases the rate of non‐Hispanic arrests and victimization, and increases the number of Hispanic arrests and victims (consistent with rising local Hispanic populations). Taken together, results are broadly consistent with the idea that agricultural harvest of labor‐intensive crops enhances local labor market opportunities that reduce incentives to commit crimes. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications that address the inherent challenges associated with measuring seasonal agricultural labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural resource development, both extractive (oil, gas, mining, and timber) and non‐extractive (tourism, real estate, outdoor recreation), has been found to negatively impact economic prosperity in rural America. One mechanism recently proposed for why this occurs is high levels of labor market concentration, or oligopsony. Oligopsony occurs when there are few employers within a labor market and can lead to suppressed wages and a power imbalance between employers and workers. In this paper, we test the moderating effect of labor market concentration on the relationship between natural resource development and per capita income and poverty in rural America from 2010 to 2016. By comparing results between extractive and non‐extractive development, as well as manufacturing, we show that labor market concentration attenuates the beneficial relationship observed at low levels of specialization in natural resources—particularly for extractive forms of development. Further, by finding no significant relationship between manufacturing specialization and economic prosperity, nor any moderating effect of labor market concentration in the case of manufacturing, we demonstrate that natural resource development and labor market concentration have a unique relationship with rural American economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores differences in national responses to foodborne disease outbreaks, addressing both the sources of policy divergence and their implications for public health and coordinated emergency response. It presents findings from a comparative study of two multi-state E. coli outbreaks, one in the United States (2006) and one in Germany (2011), demonstrating important differences in how risk managers understood and responded to each nation's first major outbreak associated with fresh produce. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and hundreds of archival documents, this paper traces how social constructions of the E. coli risk interacted with organizational dynamics among state and industry actors to produce divergent policy outcomes: the U.S. outbreak was understood primarily as an agricultural problem that led to an industry-led agricultural solution, whereas the German outbreak was understood as a human disease problem that did not result in a substantial policy response once the acute health crisis passed. The paper concludes by discussing how these policy processes generate partial solutions to foodborne contamination that expose modern societies to systemic vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-consumption scholarship has been ideologically one-sided. It has established a research domain aligned with projects favored by the global political left, such as being environmentally sustainable, consuming ethically, and resisting corporate capitalism, while overlooking strains of anti-consumption thought and action driven by conservative interests. It has advanced knowledge of individuals, their reasoning, and market behavior patterns in the here and now, but has neglected the state-sponsored and temporal dimensions of anti-consumption phenomena. This article seeks to redress this imbalance and broaden the field through a historical counternarrative illustrating right-wing prohibitions, boycotts of media content, brands, and companies, and, most recently, resistance to sustainable consumption. The different interests served, effects on consumption behavior, and market and societal impacts of these anti-consumption efforts in the American experience are analyzed. Implications for the domain of anti-consumption and macromarketing research and opportunities for potential global study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devastating Gorkha earthquake, measuring 7.8M on the Richter scale, struck Nepal on April 25, 2015, followed by a major aftershock on May 12, 2015. The earthquakes killed approximately 9,000 people and injured thousands more, garnering significant media coverage. We employ qualitative content analysis and media framing theories to demonstrate evidence of social construction in the Gorkha earthquake media coverage from two Nepali national and two Indian newspapers. Using a sample of 2,862 articles published within a year of the earthquake, five major frames: the disaster frame, disaster myths, the therapeutic community frame, recreancy, and international support emerged during the analysis. Our study demonstrates how media coverage reflects current geopolitical dynamics in the region, distinguishing impoverished Nepal from two emerging economic giants, India and China. We contribute to developing literature arguing that media coverage during disasters produces global human life hierarchies. Our study adds a class hierarchy dimension, where tourists are more valuable than locals, and even among tourists, those involved in high-end tourism attract additional media attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central premise of environmental sociology is that social and environmental processes influence one another in fundamental ways. Here we build upon that insight and develop the concept of "environmental precedent" to better incorporate the full range of environmentally consequential law ‐ even law that is not "environmental" per se ‐ in sociological analysis. Environmental precedent refers to the environmental consequences of legal processes, consequences that become the new, enduring, dynamic material reality for future legal processes. Unlike legal precedent, which may be amended to suit immediate needs through judicial or legislative action, environmental precedent can have interpretive and material consequences that may be impossible for any social process to predict, amend, or reverse. To demonstrate the concept's usefulness, we illustrate the varied, dialectical environmental and legal relationships that exist in three case studies; the Flint water crisis, the federal passage of a suite of environmental laws in the early 1970s, and how some preconditions to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina came to pass in New Orleans. In addition to foregrounding the benefits to sociology of a sharper understanding of environmental legal theory and practice, our aim is to encourage collaboration between social scientists, environmental lawyers, and legal scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how ignorance can be produced by regulatory systems. Using the case of contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), we identify patterns of institutionalized ignorance in U.S. chemical regulation. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival research, we develop a chemical regulatory pathway approach to study knowledge and ignorance production through the regulatory framework, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Investigating TSCA's operation, we consider why PFAS were relatively recently recognized as a significant public health threat, despite evidence of their risks in the 1960s. The historical context of TSCA's enactment, including the mobilization of the chemical industry, contributed to the institutionalization of organizational practices promoting distinct types of ignorance based on stakeholder position: chemical manufacturers who have discretion over knowledge production and dissemination, regulators who operate under selective ignorance, and communities and consumers who experience nescience, or total surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]