Department of Sociology

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Jack Meyerhoff Chair in American Environmental
Studies. I primarily study environmental justice in urban areas. My research tries to untangle how
decisions about urban development were often based in valuing some groups more than others, namely by
race, and how those processes have led to unequal exposure to environmental hazards and unequal access
to environmental goods. In my position at Brandeis, I can work with students to investigate these
dynamics and, importantly, explore how cities can begin to repair harm and create racially just and
sustainable futures.

I’ve been interested in environmental issues for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Chattanooga,
Tennessee and my dad used to take us camping over in Polk County near the Ocoee River. We would visit
the Cooper Basin, a site where extensive copper, iron, and sulfur mining, mineral processing and sulfuric
acid production occurred from the 1850s until the late 1980s. Industrial activities caused extensive
damage there. The EPA once called it the “largest man-made biological desert in the nation.” I did a
history project on environmental devastation at the Copper Basin in middle school. My school picked
several projects to be represented in a statewide competition. Mine was not chosen because the teachers
said it was too depressing. I’m stubborn so that just motivated me to get more involved. I joined the earth
club at my school and participated in numerous environmental cleanups and educational days around
southern Appalachia. 

My family also suffered from numerous illnesses growing up. I had severe asthma as a child and now
have a rare autoimmune disease. My mom had chronic lung disease. And my dad has been battling cancer
for around 14 years. He left Northern Ireland in the 1980s during the troubles to work at a chemical
bleachery in Asheville, NC. He was exposed to all sorts of toxins. Diseases are often framed as individual
troubles, which ignores the broader environmental and systemic factors that contribute to health
disparities. That is why the sociological imagination is so important. It allows us to connect personal
experiences, such as our family’s health issues, to larger social structures and historical contexts. I believe
that sharing personal narratives allows us to connect with others and build collective power to advocate
for change.

Two books written by Sociologists that have had the greatest impact on me are David Pellow’s Garbage
Wars and Phil Brown’s Toxic Exposures. There are also several non-sociologists whose work I greatly
admire: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, bell hooks, Anne Braden, Sylvia Wynter, and many, many more.

I worked with David Hess when I was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. He is the kindest
mentor and gave me countless opportunities to grow as a sociologist.
I also draw inspiration from so many activists, organizers, and everyday people who are working to create
a better world for all of us. Most importantly, I have been so inspired by Gen-Z students advocating for
measures to address climate change and environmental injustice at local, national, and international
levels. We all have a lot to learn from our students.

I’ve been working on several projects that examine how historic racial projects, such as redlining and the
construction of interstate-highways, co-create geographies of environmental racism through the
preservation of whiteness in U.S. cities. One project that Danielle Jacques (Sociology PhD student) and I
have been working on uses qualitative coding and exploratory text analysis to explore the Home Owners’
Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) residential security maps. Using Los Angeles as a case study, our analysis
reveals how elements of the built environment and topography of the land were perceived as protectors of
whiteness, laying the groundwork for spatial racialization, differential valuation of property, and
environmental racism. What is most striking is that A-graded neighborhoods that were designed to be
exclusively for Whites are also places that face serious natural hazards like fires and mudslides.
Essentially, HOLC surveyors identified people of color as “hazards” completely ignoring the actual risks
posed by nature. Another project I’ve been working on explores the connection between historic
redlining, interstate-highways, and contemporary on-road transportation emissions. I use random intercept
and coefficient panel models with 9661 neighborhoods nested in 194 cities. The findings suggest that
historic redlining is connected to CO 2 emitted from transportation processes.

Growing up in southern Appalachia, nature and music were a big part of my life.  I grew up playing the
fiddle, so I try to practice when I have the time. My partner and I enjoy identifying edible plants and
mushrooms through foraging walks with our friends. We have around 8 raised beds in our backyard and
grow all sorts of things – tomatoes, lettuces, okra, pumpkins, squash, radishes, peppers, watermelon,
various herbs etc. In the spring and summer, you can find me in the garden listening to music while
battling the squirrels, earwigs, and vine borers. I’m also deeply passionate about reducing animal deaths
in urban areas. I’ve saved more than one opossum from New England’s treacherous roadways.

Maurice R. Stein (Maury) took his last breaths in the same way he strove to live— peacefully and surrounded by family in his Cambridge home. His passing was one last lesson after nearly 97 years of living, teaching, and loving.  

 Born in 1926 in Buffalo, New York, Maury saw worlds of change during his near century of life. Family members recall his tales of street cars and all Yiddish newspapers. He joined the U.S. Army from 1944-1946, serving in Okinawa and Korea. He worked there as a radio-telegraph operator, and even later in life would tap out messages in Morse code absentmindedly while reading. After the war, Maury attended the University of Buffalo and then Columbia University. Upon receiving his doctorate, he began a 50-year career teaching sociology starting first at Dartmouth and Oberlin, followed by 46 years at Brandeis University..

At Brandeis, Maury participated in several decades of rapid growth from its beginning as a small school staffed by a large number of distinguished intellectuals who fled Europe during World War II and talented others to its present incarnation as a world-class research university.  In the sixties, he helped plan and chair an innovative graduate sociology program. This is when he met his colleague and decades long close friend, Morrie Schwartz. Their friendship was beautifully chronicled in the books Tuesdays with Morrie and The Wisdom of Morrie.

Maury was a fierce advocate for civil rights, women’s rights, and world peace. Both of his children remember frequent trips to protest on Cambridge Common. He also stood out as an advocate at Brandeis, sponsoring an early queer studies course. Maury was especially proud of being part of the early initiatives to question canon literature taught at Universities and add in works by authors of color. His children also recall his passion for gender equality played out at home. His daughter, Ninian, remembers her parents constantly renegotiating domestic duties, striving to make them fair. His wife, Phyllis Stein, was Director of Radcliffe Career Services and continues to work as a career counselor to this day.

After witnessing his wife give birth to their daughter in 1977, he began teaching Birth and Death at Brandeis, a wildly popular course taken by thousands of students over the decades.  This course explored the synergism between birth and death, drawing on politics, sociology, anthropology, art, literature, Indigenous studies, and spirituality while allowing students to breathe and meditate their way through the ambitious syllabus. This course countered the very American fear of death and gave a new, more beautiful and nuanced narrative, that many students took to heart and Maury embodied, even up to the moment of his own passing.

 In addition to teaching Birth and Death he also taught Social Psychology of Consciousness (with Charlie Fisher), Sociology of Art and Literature, World Mythology and Literature (with Luis Yglesias), and Modernism and Postmodernism. 

 Maury’s books include The Eclipse of Community, Identity and Anxiety (with A Vidich and D. White), Reflections on Community Studies (with A.Vidich and J. Bensman), and, most notably, Blueprint for Counter Education (with L. Miller) which has been celebrated in libraries and art museums throughout the US and Europe. This three-dimensional intellectual history of social thought and change anticipated the Internet decades before its inception.

 Maury was founding Dean of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts and earned a life-long Research Contribution Award from the Community Section of the American Sociological Association.  He considered the feminist movement, Buddhism, Bauhaus, Native American spiritualities, world poetry, and the global peace movement as key to his intellectual and pedagogical perspective. These myriad passions could be seen in his home, he had a collection of more than nineteen-thousand books, on every subject imaginable. He loved to share them with students, family, and friends. If someone shared an interest, he would disappear into his stacks and then reappear with a book for them.

 During his fifty years of college teaching, Maury was a revered teacher who cherished the chance to interact deeply with colleagues and students. After retirement, he maintained his intellectual curiosity and passion for teaching. At Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, Maury found intellectual colleagueship and companionship, participating in and teaching classes for 10 years.  In recent years he found himself in the midst of a mysterious passage into deep elderhood which included exploring the bodily, emotional, soulful, spiritual, cultural, political, tragic and comic aspects of this passage.

 In Maury’s last years, struggling with Alzheimers he began to forget things. Even as he forgot what happened that morning, or when he gave impromptu lectures in the middle of the night, he remained so peaceful and loving. To paraphrase Fred Small, “When I run out of words, I will be only love.”  

 Maury is survived by his wife of 59 years Phyllis Stein, his son Paul, his daughter Ninian, his daughter-in-law Lauren Levine, and his granddaughter Rowan Stein-Levine. He is survived by many other loved ones in his mishpocha, including students Becky Thompson, Joanie Bronfman and Steve Dandeneau, and colleague Charlie Fisher.

 Contributions in Maury Stein's honor can be made to the ACLU, Good Shepherd Community Care Hospice, or a charity of your choice. 

 Memories of Maury can be shared and found at https://www.forevermissed.com/maury-stein.