Research output per year
Research output per year
Personal profile
About
Prof. Maria Akchurin is a sociologist working in the areas of environmental sociology, political sociology, and urban sociology. Her primary research agenda explores historical and contemporary questions about power, inequality, and social change as they relate to environment and society. She is especially interested in how global processes—such as the spread of water privatization or the global demand for extractive industries—connect to how people make sense of environmental and social consequences on the ground. She is also interested in the social processes that lead the physical and digital infrastructures we use to become morally and politically contested.
Prof. Akchurin has studied how nature became a subject of legal rights in Ecuador, conflicts over land use and water availability in areas with mining activity in northern Chile, and the privatization and transformation of urban water provision in Argentina and Chile. She is working on expanding her prior research into a book, tentatively titled Contested Infrastructures: Water, Privatization, and Place-Based Protest in Argentina and Chile. In parallel, she is researching the politics of environmental remediation and community consultation in Latin America through an analysis of litigation relating to mining in Chilean environmental courts, focusing on cases relating to copper, gold, and lithium extraction.
Research Interests
- Environmental sociology
- political sociology
- urban sociology
- environmental justice
- global and comparative sociology
- sociology of knowledge
Disciplines
- Environmental Studies
- Sociology
- Politics and Social Change
- Theory, Knowledge and Science
- Social Justice
Research output
- 10 Article
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Mining, Water Conflicts, and Climate Change in Chile's Atacama Desert
Akchurin, M., Feb 1 2025, In: Current History. 124, 859, p. 61-67 7 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Designing Better Access to Education? Unified Enrollment, School Choice, and the Limits of Algorithmic Fairness in New Orleans School Admissions
Akchurin, M. & Chouhy, G., Jun 2024, In: Qualitative Sociology. 47, 2, p. 281-323 43 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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How Local Perceptions Contribute to Urban Environmental Activism: Evidence from the Chicago Metropolitan Area
Vivas Bastidas, J., Akchurin, M., Garbarski, D. & Doherty, D., 2024, In: The Sociological Quarterly. 65, 1Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile -
Akchurin_Environmental Justice at the Environmental Courts? EXIS.pdf
Akchurin, M., 2023, In: Extractive Industries and Society.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile -
Environmental justice at the environmental courts? Mining, socioenvironmental conflicts, and environmental litigation in northern Chile
Akchurin, M., Sep 2023, In: Extractive Industries and Society. 15, 101279.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review