Chris Rea has joined the faculty at the Glenn College in partnership with The Ohio State University’s Sustainable and Resilient Economy Discovery Theme. He completes his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles and will spend a year at Brown University as a Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate in Environment and Society before beginning his full-time position at the Glenn College during the 2019-2020 academic year.
His research explores the political dynamics of market economies, institutional and organizational change, economic and environmental regulation and the politics and production of scientific knowledge.
Rea was also formerly a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany; was a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results Fellow; is an alumnus of the Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; and was also honored to be named a “Young Scholar in Social Movements” by the Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame.
How did you decide the focus of your research?
I study environmental politics and policy, and especially the increasing use of markets and market-like instruments as regulatory tools. I was initially drawn to the seemingly paradoxical features of these approaches. Markets and economic activity more broadly, after all, are often understood as the root cause of modern environmental problems. Unregulated or poorly regulated markets have led to the clearcutting of forests, to the devastating depletion of fish stocks and, as we are increasingly aware, to the world-changing emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane—indeed, levels of greenhouse gas pollution basically rise and fall to the rhythm of modern market economies. So a seemingly paradoxical questions arises: how on Earth can we expect to use markets in nature, loosely defined, to protect nature from markets—espeically when markets themselves are so closely linked to environmental harm?
Questions like that were the initial hook into my research. Now, the deeper I get into it, the more that even more basic questions about institutional and regulatory change, organizational and administrative politics and the politics of environmental protection itself drive my research. In short, trying to understand the seemingly paradoxical use of markets as regulatory tools turned out to be the entry point into much bigger questions about regulation, governance, and social institutions and organizations in a general sense—especially insomuch as these areas of inquiry bear on environmental problems and concerns.
What are some of your aspirations for inside the classroom while teaching at the Glenn College?
That's simple. I want to give students the intellectual and practical tools they need to understand complex social problems and to work towards their solutions; and I want them to come away with a big-picture understanding of how hard and also how important it is to do that work.
How do you engage students?
As much as possible, I try to link my teaching to contemporary, real-world problems that confront all of us--often in different ways via different avenues, depending on our individual backgrounds and life experiences--but that nonetheless matter across individuals, in real life, today. A wide range of environmental problems obviously fit that bill, but so do many others. At the same time, I always strive to find ways to help myself and my students confront our own assumptions and over-simplifications about ``the way the world works." Politics and policy and the social world that swirls around them are incredibly complex; digging in to confront and grapple with that complexity is not easy, but I find that to a curious mind, it is almost inherently engaging to try. The payoff can be huge: there is nothing quite like realizing that the way you thought the world works is not the way it really does. I try to create as many of those moments for students possible.
How would you describe your teaching style?
I think of myself as a passionate and engaged teacher who wants to find ways to turn learning over to students themselves at every turn—that is, to make my classrooms student-centered. I try to find moments for students to discuss and dig into issues amongst themselves; where possible I try to leave the "sage on the stage" model of higher education aside, and to instead move around the room engaging with students in smaller groups or in thoughtful discussions. When and where I can meaningfully do it, I also try to create opportunities for the students themselves to become the teachers, via presentations or student-led activities and so on. Sometimes it's a challenge to live up to my own pedagogical expectations, but I try to as much as I can.