Miriam Greenberg, Ph.D.

Dr. Miriam Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Urban Studies Research Cluster at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (winner of the 2009 Robert Park Award for the best book in urban sociology). She is currently collaborating on a new book, Crisis Cities, that addresses the question of interrelated crises through an analysis of the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Her research highlights how pre-existing and emerging contradictions in New York and New Orleans —namely socio-economic, environmental, and spatial inequality; uneven exposure to risk; and uneven forms of post-disaster redevelopment— helped turn discrete disasters into  longer-term crises with highly unequal effects, particularly along lines of race, class, and neighborhood.

Dr. Greenberg is interested in contributing to a critical understanding of the roots and dynamics of the interrelated crisis in cities and regions of California as they compare with other regions of the U.S.; the role of media framing and symbolic capital in response to crisis; the emergence of varying discourses and practices of "urban sustainability" in the post-crisis period; as well as the variety of creative political responses on the part of new activists and coalitions throughout the state.