Jordan Fox is associate professor of sociology and criminology and of environment and sustainability. He is both a theorist and empirical researcher, who primarily uses qualitative methods. His main areas of research are environmental sociology, comparative historical sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy of science, and realist social theory.

His forthcoming book from NYU press, Nature’s Complex: Crisis and the Paradox of Environmental Control (with Daniel Shtob), examines how the legal and financial processes we use to manage socio-environmental crises are constructed to reduce the world into their own terms, producing a built-in ignorance of socio-environmental complexity, and, as a result, even larger environmental problems down the road. To do so, it draws on diverse fields including environmental studies, historical sociology, complexity science, and sociologies of ignorance and of disaster to illuminate three wildly different accounts - the reversal of the Chicago River and the potential Asian Carp invasion in the Great Lakes, Hurricane Irma in the Florida Keys, and the Camp Fire in and around Paradise California - in which even the most well-meaning legal and financial efforts served to not only deepen environmental problems, but produce new and surprising ones. His co-edited volume, Environmental Sociology Now, a gathering original essays written by emerging scholars regarding the present and future of the field, is now available from the University of California Press.

Current and future and projects include an examination of how scientific and geopolitical institutions have unevenly interacted with the material realities of North American Right Whale populations over time; building a “postpositivist sociological naturalism,” or a theoretical foundation for including the success of scientific explanation into social analyses without abdicating critique of scientific production; as well as a comparative historical study of how invasive species ecology and fire ecology, two forms of environmental knowledge that center on understanding how and why our environmental relationships change without our permission, have both separately and together interacted with changing political, material, and cultural contexts.

Please note that Jordan published under the name Jordan Fox Besek until 2023.

• PhD, University of Oregon, 2017
• MA, University at Buffalo, 2012
• BA, Fordham University, 2006

• Classical Sociological Theory (graduate)
  
• Contemporary Sociological Theory (graduate)
• Sociology of Science (graduate)
  
• Environmental Sociology (graduate)
• Cinematic Sociology
  
• Social Change