Zack W. Almquist

Zack W. Almquist

Associate Professor of Sociology, Adjunct Associate Professor of Statistics and Senior Data Science Fellow @ eScience

Environmental Action and Governance

My work in this set of projects is focused on understanding social networks in the context of social movements and governmental action in the climate change and environmental action space.

Environmental Governance

Organizational Decision-making in the face of climate change: Dr. Benjamin Bagozzi, and I am engaged in creating several large-scale dynamic networks with direct application to governmental policy and decision-making regarding climate change. International climate change negotiations often are undertaken at an annual Conference of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC’s 21st COP (held in late November 2015) served as a watershed moment, given its mandate to achieve a legally binding universal agreement on climate change among all the world’s nations. We have conducted an original analysis of the country-level relations network underlying these international climate change negotiations through text and network methods.

Working Papers

  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, D. Blinova, and Z. Brown (2024). In Search for Common Ground: Exploring Value Networks at the UNFCCC Climate Change Talks. Submitted to Network Science.
  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, D. Blinova, and Z. Brown (2024). Dynamic Networks of Negotiation for International Climate Change Cooperation. Submitted to Environmental Sociology.
  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, D. Blinova, Z. Brown and M. Rulis (2024). Network Drivers of Organizational Diversity and Participation Across 30 Years of International Climate Change Negotiations. Submitted to Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Environmental Action

Radical Environmental Groups: Radical environmental activists, in their efforts to call attention to environmental problems, to communicate with like-minded groups, and to mobilize support for their activities, produce an enormous amount of text. Access to this information leads to an intriguing set of questions: can one uncover the underlying network structure of even covert environmental activist groups from their publications? And, if so, can one also identify which groups and sub-networks are more prone to certain impactful behaviors (e.g., violent versus peaceful protest activities)? We have published two papers on the Do or Die! Movement in the UK through combined text, network, and spatial analysis methods. We then followed up with a comparative case in the US, where we looked into the texts produced by the Animal Liberation Front movement.

Peer Reviewed Articles

  • Almquist, Z.W. and B. E. Bagozzi (2020). Automated Text Analysis for Understanding Radical Activism: The Topical Agenda of the North American Animal Liberation Movement. Research and Politics 7(2), 1-8.
  • Almquist, Z.W. and B. E. Bagozzi (2019). Using Radical Environmental Texts to Uncover Network Structure and Network Features. Sociological Methods & Research 48(4), 905–960.
  • Almquist, Z.W. and B. E. Bagozzi (2016). The Spatial Properties of Radical Environmental Organizations in the UK: Do or Die! PloS ONE 11(11), 1–19.

Disaster Response

Evacuation and Displacement Due to Climate Change and Disasters: I have been engaged in modeling the network dynamics of organizational decision-making during disasters, focusing on hurricanes and fires. Recently, in collaboration with Facebook Data for Good (JW Schneider (Demography and Survey Science, Facebook) and Paige Maas (Core Data Science, Facebook)), we surveyed displaced and evacuated individuals post-natural disasters. We have so far surveyed after Floods in India and Bushfires in Australia. The first paper on this is available on Arxiv (Maas et al., 2020) and is currently under review. It is the basis for Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates on displacement.

Peer Reviewed Articles and Policy Reports

  • Almquist, Z. W., E. S. Spiro, and C. T. Butts (2016). “Shifting Attention: Modeling Follower Relationship Dynamics among US Emergency Management-related Organizations During a Colorado Wildfire.” In: Social Network Analysis of Disaster Response, Recovery, and Adaptation. Ed. by A. Faas and E. Jones. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier.
  • Maas, P., Z. W. Almquist, E. Giraudy, and J. Schneider (2020). Using social media to measure demographic responses to natural disaster: Insights from a large-scale Facebook survey following the 2019 Australia Bushfires. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2008.03665.
  • Almquist, Z. W. and C. T. Butts (2014). Evolving Context: Evidence from Temporal Change in Organizational Collaboration over the course of the 2005 Katrina Disaster.
  • Giraudy, E., P. Maas, S. Iyer, Z. Almquist, J. Schneider, and A. Dow (2021). Measuring long-term displacement using Facebook data. IDMC Global Rep. Internal Displacement (GRID), Geneva, Switzerland, Tech. Rep.