Profile: Raoul Liévanos Sociology

Raoul Liévanos

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SOCIOLOGY

BY MATT COOPER, OREGON QUARTERLY PHOTO BY DUSTIN WHITAKER, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

If you go to a doctor for chest pain, you don’t want a prescription for a sore throat. That’s how Raoul Liévanos looks at government policies for disadvantaged groups: will the remedy solve the real problem? Or could it be misguided due to an incomplete diagnosis?

As an environmental sociologist, Liévanos studies spatial and institutional factors—segregation and governmental policies, for example— that create inequality in how people experience their environments. It’s the difference between the experiences of privileged and disadvantaged neighborhoods regarding, say, toxic exposures, flood protection, or access to healthy, affordable food.

Liévanos and fellow University of Oregon sociologists Clare Evans and Ryan Light recently analyzed the 2014 water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan. They discovered that the city’s switch to drinking water from the Flint River disproportionately threatened areas with high percentages of singlefather Black and single-mother Latina families.

Research and public debate have historically focused on the role that racial and class discrimination played in the concentration of lead exposure in specific parts of the city. But the findings by Liévanos and his colleagues highlight the importance of race, gender, and family structure as factors at the finer scale of the neighborhood block level.

It’s an important distinction, Liévanos says, in part because the government’s failure to recognize these factors meant that the vulnerabilities of Black fathers, Latina mothers, and their respective families have been overlooked. In addition, local officials initially distributed only English-language lead advisories, instead of Spanishlanguage advisories for Spanishspeaking people.

“If we develop policies geared toward one particular understanding of a problem but the policies are very