Maria Akchurin, PhD
Assistant Professor
Maria Akchurin is a sociologist whose research bridges environmental, political, and urban sociology across the Americas. Her work investigates how global processes—such as intensive resource extraction, water privatization, and environmental degradation—transform local environments, social dynamics, and everyday life.
Central to her scholarship is an inquiry into how communities and grassroots organizations build social infrastructures and mobilize local capacities to confront socio-environmental challenges. These include struggles over urban water access, land-use disputes, disproportionate exposures to environmental hazards, and efforts to remediate past environmental harms. Her research also examines the role of knowledge and expertise in shaping environmental policy, particularly in contexts marked by scientific uncertainty and existential risk. She explores how different kinds of expertise interact and compete in the governance of environmental issues.
Dr. Akchurin has conducted fieldwork in Chile and Ecuador, analyzing how social movements and community organizations interpret and challenge the socioenvironmental impacts of extractivist economic development models. Her studies include efforts to secure the legal recognition of nature’s rights in Ecuador and environmental litigation against the impacts of intensifying extraction of copper and lithium mining in northern Chile. Her earlier comparative work on urban water privatization in Argentina and Chile emphasizes the importance of place-based analysis and different patterns of political coalition-building around access to water infrastructure in understanding divergent policy outcomes shaping water and sanitation.
In the United States, Dr. Akchurin collaborates with 大象传媒 students and local organizations in Chicago to study how environmental justice groups are working to reshape municipal policies. Her current research focuses on how these groups advocate for public health-centered approaches to measuring pollution, urban land use, permitting decisions, and enforcement, especially in fenceline communities disproportionately affected by exposures to environmental hazards. Her collaborative work with 大象传媒 colleagues complements this research by examining how residents’ perceptions of their neighborhood conditions and their sense of social belonging relate to their participation in environmental collective action, and by exploring the relationship between perceived hazardous exposures and stress across different ethnoracial and gender groups.
At 大象传媒, Dr. Akchurin teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental sociology, environmental justice, urban sociology, power in society, and an engaged learning course in qualitative research methods. Beyond academia, she enjoys growing vegetables, fruits, and prairie plants and is interested in art, music, and urban spaces that bring people together. A 1.5-generation immigrant with family roots in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, she has lived in various parts of the United States and is now happy to call the Great Lakes region home.
Education
- PhD, Sociology
University of Chicago, 2015 - MA, Sociology
University of Chicago, 2009 - BA, International Studies, Specialization in Latin American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, 2004
Research Interests
- Environmental Sociology
- Political Sociology
- Urban Sociology
- Environmental Justice, Global and Comparative Sociology
- Sociology of Knowledge.
Professional Employment
- American Sociological Association
- Latin American Studies Association
- Social Science History Association
- Non-Resident Research Fellow, Center for Inter-American Policy & Research, Tulane University
Courses Taught
- SOCL 234: Cities, Suburbs, & Beyond
- SOCL 260: Power in Society
- SOCL 272: Environmental Sociology
- SOCL 302: Qualitative Research
- SOCL 462: Urban Sociology Graduate Seminar
- SOCL 520: Environmental Justice: From Sacrifice Zones to Sustainable Cities
Publications/Research Listings
Akchurin, Maria, and Juanita Vivas Bastidas. 2025. “Beyond Sacrifice Zones: Rethinking Pollution Through a Cumulative Impact Lens.” Contexts.
Akchurin, Maria. “Mining, Water Conflicts, and Climate Change in Chile’s Atacama Desert.” Current History 124 (859): 61–67. February 2025.
Akchurin, Maria and Gabriel Chouhy. 2024. "Designing Better Access to Education? Unified Enrollment, School Choice, and the Limits of Algorithmic Fairness in New Orleans School Admissions." Qualitative Sociology.
Vivas Bastidas, Juanita, Maria Akchurin, Dana Garbarski, and David Doherty. 2024. “How Local Perceptions Contribute to Urban Environmental Activism: Evidence from the Chicago Metropolitan Area.” The Sociological Quarterly 65(1): 38-60.
Akchurin, Maria. 2023. “Environmental Justice at the Environmental Courts? Mining, Socioenvironmental Conflicts, and Environmental Litigation in Northern Chile.” Extractive Industries and Society 15 (Special Issue on the Politics of Policy Implementation, edited by Zaraí Toledo Orozco and Eduardo Silva).
Akchurin, Maria. 2022. “Contested Infrastructures: Water, Privatization, and Place-Based Protest in Greater Buenos Aires." City & Community 22(3): 171-194.
Akchurin, Maria. 2020. “Mining and Defensive Mobilization: Explaining Opposition to Extractive Industries in Chile.” Sociology of Development 6(1): 1-29.
Silva, Eduardo, Maria Akchurin, and Anthony Bebbington. 2018. “The Consequences of Social Resistance to Extractive Development in Latin America.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 106: 25-46.
Akchurin, Maria. 2015. “Constructing the Rights of Nature: Constitutional Reform, Mobilization, and Environmental Protection in Ecuador.” Law and Social Inquiry 40(4): 937-968.
Akchurin, Maria and Cheol-Sung Lee. 2013. “Pathways to Empowerment: Repertoires of Women’s Activism and Gender Earnings Equality.” American Sociological Review 78(4): 679-701.