Betsy Priem (2022)

Betsy Priem is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago who specializes in environmental and urban sociology. Her research focuses on climate governance, with an emphasis on processes of adaptation policy and environmental justice.

For her dissertation, Priem leverages cases of a climate adaptation strategy known as managed retreat to investigate how and why local communities and governments select certain adaptation strategies over others. This project combines qualitative approaches with computational techniques to illuminate barriers and pathways to harm reduction initiatives, focusing on the processual and relational dynamics in local governance. The 2022 NISS Dissertation Grant will support ethnographic field work and interviews for this research. Priem holds a B.A. in sociology and psychology from the University of Minnesota, an M.S. in education and special education from Touro College, and an M.A. in both sociology and social science from the University of Chicago.