Hi, I’m Zach!
Originally from St. Louis, I spent 15 years getting 3 degrees at the University of Missouri and then moved to the south. Now I reside in Greenwood, South Carolina and work as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lander University.
My academic work is focused on my own little niche of what could be considered the most pressing problems in the world today: climate disaster, and social isolation. Believe it or not, the solution to these dovetails nicely in intentional communities. These collections of people with a mission are, as I’ve found in my research, nodes of larger social movement activity that represent incredibly interesting social experiments.
I have also recently begun to conduct research on food insecurity since living in Greenwood. There’s a palpable poverty here, alongside recent growth and expansion of wealth.
As for the non-academic side of my life, my hobbies are too numerous to count, and I wish I could pick a few to get really good at. My favorites are woodworking and tinkering with new technologies, and those go hand in hand with working on DIY projects around my house. I also care deeply about sustainability and local food systems. To that end I have converted a part of my yard into edibles, and work bit-by-bit to displace the grass with useful, edible plants.