Brian O'Neill

I attended Washington & Jefferson College as an undergraduate where I was interested initially in the natural sciences.

Eventually, I became more involved with social scientists.  During my senior year, I helped to design and work on a project surveying the county surrounding Washington & Jefferson about their views related to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking."  

As a graduate student I continued to pursue this line of inquiry into public opinion and in 2020 (online first) published “A Public Health Frame for Fracking? Predicting Public Support for Hydraulic Fracturing”  in The Sociological Quarterly with my colleague Matthew Schneider. 

Staying within the frame of environmental sociology, my dissertation work builds on an ethnographic research project that I conducted from 2019-2020 into public policies and social movements for water, emerging technologies, and the finance of that sector. In that work, I concentrate on the contentious issue of desalination, creating potable water from the ocean, to explore the dynamics of environmental politics in the face of water scarcity and climate change in arid regions. I plan to continue this work with future investigations into the quickly emerging nexus of water and markets.