Why aren’t more people responding to climate change? How do people collectively normalize disturbing information? How can emotions be related to our social structure? A main focus of my research over the last decade and a half has engaged these questions in relation to our failure to effectively respond to climate change. I have also done work with my colleague Barbara Sutton on the social organization of denial as it relates to human rights violations.

Book

Norgaard, Kari Marie Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life MIT Press, 2011

Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications

Allison Ford and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2020 “Whose Everyday Climate Cultures?” Climatic Change.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2019 “Making Sense of the Spectrum of Climate Denial” Critical Policy Studies pp 437-441.

Brulle, Robert and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2019 “Avoiding Cultural Trauma: Climate Change and Cultural Inertia” Environmental Politics pp 1-23.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2018 “The Sociological Imagination in a Time of Climate Change” Environmental Politics pp 1-6.

Sutton, Barbara and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2013 “Cultures of Denial: Avoiding Knowledge of State Violations of Human Rights Violations in Argentina and the United States.” Sociological Forum 28(3): 495-524.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2012 “Climate Denial and the Construction of Innocence: Reproducing Transnational Privilege in the Face of Climate Change” Race, Gender & Class 19 (1-2): 104-130.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2007 “The Politics of Invasive Weed Management: Gender Race and Risk Perception in Rural California” Rural Sociology 72(3): 450-477.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2006. “‘People Want To Protect Themselves A Little Bit’: Emotions, Denial and Social Movement Nonparticipation” Sociological Inquiry 76(3): 372-396.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2006. “‘We Don’t Really Want to Know’: Environmental Justice and Socially Organized Denial of Global Warming in Norway” Organization and Environment 19(3): 347-470.

Norgaard, Kari Marie and Richard York, 2005 “Gender Equality and State Environmentalism” Gender and Society 19(4): 506-522.

Selected Book Chapters

“Mitigating Climate Change: Sociological Perspectives” with Karen Erhardt-Martinez, Thomas Rudel and Jeffrey Broadbent forthcoming in Dunlap, Riley E. and Robert J. Brulle (eds.). 2015. Sociological Perspectives on Climate Change (Report of the ASA Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change). New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 199-234.

“Normalizing the Unthinkable: Climate Denial and Everyday Life” Kenneth Gould and Tammy Lewis, editors Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 2014

Norgaard, Kari Marie “The Social Organization of Climate Denial: Emotions, Culture and Political Economy” in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society edited by John Dryzek. Richard Norgaard and David Schlosberg, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Selected Research Reports

Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change, Concept Note for World Development Report, World Bank, 2009.

Selected Non-Refereed Publications

“Climate Change is a Social Issue” January 17, 2016Chronicle of Higher Education

“Climate Debate Isn’t So Heated in US” invited blog post, New York Times Room for Debate May 8, 2014

“The Everyday Denial of Climate Change” July 5, 2012 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

“Emotions of Climate Apathy” blog post for Mobilizing Ideas Emotions in Social Movements Blog

Feature Interview 2011 “A Dialog Between Renee Lertzman and Kari Norgaard” Ecopsychology 3(1): 5-9.