Shannon Elizabeth Bell

Shannon Elizabeth Bell is a Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. She is an environmental sociologist and Appalachian studies scholar whose research and teaching focus on just energy transitions, the socio-ecological impacts of fossil fuel extraction and transport, and forest-based traditions and lifeways in Central Appalachia. She is author of two award-winning books: Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia (The MIT Press, 2016), as well as a wide array of journal articles, book chapters, and essays. She has received awards from a number of national and international professional societies, including the Rural Sociological Society, the American Sociological Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Association for Humanist Sociology, and the Society for Human Ecology.

Professor Bell has conducted extensive research in and with Central Appalachian communities, including an 8-month Photovoice project with women living in five coal-mining communities in Southern West Virginia. Her most recent projects include an ethnography of Appalachian wild harvesting traditions and economies, an examination of inequities in the Appalachian wild-harvested herbal supply chain, and the creation of the Forest Botanicals Region Living Monument, which celebrates the historical and present-day relationships and traditions that a diversity of Appalachian peoples have long held with the medicinal herbs and wild foods of the Appalachian forest understory.

Primary areas of research:

• Forest farming and wild harvesting traditions and economies in Central Appalachia
• Social ecology of native at-risk forest understory herbs in Appalachia
• Inequities in the wild-harvested herbal supply chain
• Feminist energy systems
• Just transitions
• Environmental and climate justice