Contested Illnesses Research Group
Brown University , Providence RI

Phil Brown is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Brown University. He received his doctorate from Brandeis University. Beginning in 2000, supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Science Foundation, he began examining “contested illnesses” such as asthma, breast cancer, and Gulf War-related illnesses, involving public debates over environmental causes and the impact of social movements on those debates. Stemming from this work, he began a project examining social movements in health. Under a new National Science Foundation grant, he is examining coalitions between environmental organizations and labor unions and other labor organizations, such as Committees on Occupational Safety and Health. Under new grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Science Foundation, he is studying connections between breast cancer advocacy and environmental justice organizing. He is the author of No Safe Place : Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (Phil Brown and Edwin Mikkelsen), about the Woburn childhood leukemia cluster. He is editor of Perspectives in Medical Sociology and co-editor of the collection Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine (Steve Kroll-Smith, Phil Brown, and Valerie Gunter). With Stephen Zavestoski, he co-edited the 2004 special issue of Sociology of Health and Illness, “Social Movements in Health,” released in December 2005 as a book.

Phil Brown is working on an NIEHS environmental justice grant with Toxics Action Center, Boston University School of Public Health, Health-Link, and Haverill Environmental League on a project, “Community Environmental Health Research: Finding Meaning,” that examines how community groups deal with official health studies. He is also working on a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases project on research ethics in environmental health and environmental justice, that conducts workshops and conferences on community-based participatory research, and develops curriculum for courses in environmental health and environmental justice research ethics.

Prior to studying health and the environment, he studied mental health policy, mental patients’ rights, and clinical interaction in psychiatric settings. Among his publications from that work are The Transfer of Care: Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization and Its Aftermath, and Mental Health Care and Social Policy (edited).

Phil is collaborating with Communities for a Better Environment in California, and with Silent Spring Institute in Massachusetts on a community-based household exposure study on endocrine-disrupting chemicals funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He is also working on an NSF-funded project, Katrina and the Built Environment: Spatial and Social Impacts, which examines which communities were most heavily affected by Hurricane Katrina, which will be rebuilt, and how they will be different from before. Phil directs the Community Outreach Core of Brown's Superfund Basic Research Program and directs the Ethical and Social Implications component of Brown's National Science Foundation NIRT project in nanotechnology.

Phil Brown was previously Chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, and Chair of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Apart from health social movements and environmental health, Phil also studies the Jewish experience in the Catskill Mountains. He is the author of Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area, and editor of In the Catskills: A Century Of The Jewish Experience In “The Mountains.” He is a co-founder and President of the Catskills Institute, an organization that works to record and remember the history of the Catskills through yearly conferences (eleven as of August 2005), a newsletter, article reprints, a website (http://catskills.brown.edu), public speaking, coordination and support of scholarly research, and maintaining an archive.

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Brown University, Department of Sociology
Brown Univeristy, Center for Environmental Studies
Brown University, Environmental Change Initiative
Brown University, Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Superfund Basic Research Program

Toxics Action Center
Silent Spring Institute
Communities for a Better Environment
Boston University School of Public Health Environmental Health Department
Collaborative Initiative for Research Ethics in Environmental Health