Zack W. Almquist

Zack W. Almquist

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

Environmental Action and Governance

This set of projects focuses on understanding social networks in the context of social movements and governmental action around climate change and the environment.

Environmental Governance

Organizational Decision-making in the face of climate change: Dr. Benjamin Bagozzi and I are engaged in creating several large-scale dynamic networks with direct application to governmental policy and decision-making regarding climate change. International climate change negotiations are typically undertaken at the annual Conferences 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 using text and network methods.

Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, D. Blinova, and Z. Brown (2026). In search of common ground: Exploring Value Networks at the UNFCCC Climate Change Talks. Network Science 14, e7.
  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, D. Blinova, and Z. Brown (2025). Dynamic Networks of Negotiation for International Climate Change Cooperation. Environmental Sociology.
  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, and D. Blinova (2026). “Network Drivers of Organizational Diversity and Participation Across 30 Years of International Climate Change Negotiations.” In: Organizations and Climate Change. Ed. by I. B. Vasi and E. Walker. Emerald Publishing.

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 using combined text, network, and spatial analysis methods. We then followed up with a comparative case in the U.S., where we examined the texts produced by the Animal Liberation Front movement.

Peer Reviewed Articles

  • Almquist, Z. W., B. E. Bagozzi, and D. Blinova (2025). Historical Spatio-Temporal Data on North American Radical Environmental Direct-Action Events. Data in Brief 60, 111543.
  • 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) and Paige Maas (Core Data Science) — we surveyed displaced and evacuated individuals following natural disasters. We have so far conducted surveys following floods in India and bushfires in Australia. The first paper on this is available on arXiv (Maas et al., 2025) and is currently under review. It is the basis for Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates of 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 (2025). Evacuation decisions in response to natural disasters: Insights from a large-scale social media survey. 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.