About

Professor Kelly Moore is interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, broadly speaking, and more specifically, in how scientific and technical tools and frameworks shape power, and how they are challenged and transformed by social movements and other means. She is especially interested in these relationships and processes as they relate to gender, ethnorace and social class. Her current major project is a study of the rise and effects of wellness, during a period of neoliberal reform and a reorganization of gender and race politics in the US. Articles from this project have appeared in Geoforum, Political Power and Social Theory, Controversies in Science and Technology, and The Scholar and the Feminist, and she is at work on a monograph on this topic.

She teaches classes on the Sociology and Politics of Food, Science and Society, Social Movements, Knowledge, Power and Expertise, and Introduction to Sociology.

With Scott Frickel, she introduced a framework that organizes a distinctively sociological approach to understanding science and technology that they call the political sociology of science (The New Political Sociology of Science, S Frickel and K Moore, eds. University of Wisconsin Press (2006). The book asks why and how science and technology work better for some people than others, and how groups have been able to change technoscientific relations so that they are more equitable. With Scott Frickel, she is writing a short book that updates this perspective with the scholarship that has followed, and more fully fleshes out methods of reorganizing technoscientific relations for justice. Influenced by this perspective, she recently edited The Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology and Society (with D.L. Kleinman). Other work that draws on the political sociology of science, including on science and neoliberal globalization, has appeared in Theory and Society (winner of the Star-Nelkin article prize from the American Sociological Association Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology) and other venues.

Professor Moore's earlier work investigated how and why science has come to be seen as “political.” In Disrupting Science (Princeton University Press, 2008; she analyzed how scientists themselves, reacting to the militarization of science during the Cold War, called into question some of the ideological underpinnings of the power of science, including the idea that it was always related to progress, that its practitioners were value neutral with respect to their research projects, and that political isolation led to the best forms of knowledge. To do so, she compared three different organizations that were strongly influenced by social movements, and showed how they challenged different aspects of the relationship between science and the military, and how those challenges contributed to greater revelation of the ways in which power shapes knowledge. This book was the winner of the Tilly Award and Merton Award, given by the American Sociological Association sections on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and Science, Knowledge and Technology Sections, respectively.

She currently serve as a member of the Council of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and was a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in 2011–2012.

Degrees

PhD, Sociology
University of Arizona, 1993

MA, Sociology
University of Arizona, 1988

BA, Sociology
University of Arizona, 1984

Selected Publications

Kelly Moore, David Hess, Daniel L. Kleinman and Scott Frickel. 2011. “Science and Neoliberal Globalization.” Theory & Society 40: 505–532

Kelly Moore and Matthew J. Hoffman. 2014. Political Power and Social Theory 27: 223–258.

Kelly Moore and Judith Wittner. 2014. "Global Hunger and Global Obesity." Controversies in Science and Technology, v. 4, DL Kleinman, KA Cloud-Hansen, and J Handlesman, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alison Hope Alkon, Daniel C. Block, Kelly Moore, Catherine Gillis, Nicole DiNuccio and Noel Chavez. 2013. "Foodways of the Urban Poor." Geoforum 48: 126–135.

Kelly Moore. Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975 ‌(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008) Moore Chapt. 6

Kelly Moore. 2006. “Powered By the People: Scientific Authority in Participatory Science.” Pp. 299–323 in Scott Frickel and Kelly Moore, eds., The New Political Sociology of Science: Organizations, Networks, and Institutions. Madison, WI. University of Wisconsin Press. Science and Society Series, Daniel L. Kleinman and Jo Handlesman, eds. http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3618.htm

Scott Frickel and Kelly Moore. 2006. “Prospects and Challenges for a New Political Sociology of Science.” Pp. 3–31 in Scott Frickel and Kelly Moore, eds., The New Political Sociology of Science: Organizations, Networks, and Institutions. Madison, WI. University of Wisconsin Press. Science and Society Series, Daniel L. Kleinman and Jo Handlesman, eds. http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3618.htm‌

Kelly Moore and Nicole Hala. "Organizing Identity: The Creation of Science for the People" 2002. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 19:309–339

Kelly Moore. “: American Science and the Creation of Public Interest Science Organizations, 1955–1975.” 1996. American Journal of Sociology 101: 1592–1627.