About
Diane Sicotte, PhD is an environmental sociologist with research interests in environmental injustice and inequality, energy and labor, and plastics in society. In 2018 she (and Co-P.I. Kelly Joyce) received a grant from the National Science Foundation, Award #1827464, to study the energy preferences of U.S. labor unions and their members and leaders in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Recent publications examine how energy workers view climate change and a possible transition away from fossil fuel use; how fracked natural gas liquids contribute to accumulations of waste plastics; how environmental policy in the U.S. can move away from recycling and toward source reduction as a way to deal with plastic waste; and environmental injustice generated by global commodity chains producing plastics. Much of her environmental justice scholarship examines racial and social class inequalities in proximity to environmental hazards in the Philadelphia area. She is the author of From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region (Rutgers University Press, 2016).
She teaches sociology courses on environmental justice, environmental movements, disasters, and social class inequality. She is the first person in her family to graduate from college.