Dr. Pellow is a trailblazer who brings truth and innovation to his research, teaching, and community work. He began his career at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Research policy from 1998 to 1999. Also in 1998, Dr. Pellow started working at the University of Colorado – Boulder as an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies and Sociology Department and as faculty at the Institute of Behavioral Science. In 2000, Dr. Pellow, with Adam Weinberg and Allan Schnaiberg, published his first book, Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development. Dr. Pellow’s career has included prolific writings in journals, books, and reports.

In 2002, Dr. Pellow returned to California to work as a professor at UC San Diego. He was a professor in the Ethnic Studies Department and Directed the California Cultures in Comparative Perspective (CCCP).

Dr. Pellow believes strongly in cultivating connections between faculty, students, and community concerns. He started the CCCP program in response to the “attack” on affirmative action in California. The program is a “diversity initiative at UC San Diego that does not violate the law, Proposition 209, which phased out affirmative action. We wanted to hire experts on diversity, so the idea is to hire these people and hope that they are of different racial backgrounds,” he says.

Through the CCCP, several departments hired faculty who are experts in ethnic issues in California. These professors help students make connections between ethnic issues in California and those of the entire world. Under Dr. Pellow’s leadership, the CCCP supported the university’s approval of a Minor in California Cultures, which enables students to receive credit for internships and fieldwork conducted in community organizations in the state. The CCCP also facilitates the Activist-Scholars Dialogue. According to Dr. Pellow, the program creates a campus forum for Californian community leaders to discuss their work and critique the university, creating a rich and needed discourse. Partnerships, resource exchanges, and collaborations have grown from the highly anticipated and well-attended discussions.

In 2002, Dr. Pellow published his first solo book, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. The book won a Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award in 2003.

In 2005, Dr. Pellow discussed the program and explained his belief that this type of community-based learning should become commonplace. “I have only been here three years, but when I was told that nothing like this has been done before, I was stunned, given the level of resources available at the university. It’s all about breaking down barriers of town and gown and the elitism of the university,” he says. Dr. Pellow’s mission is to ensure the university serves the needs of all community members. “All the work we (CCCP) do is with organizations and communities working with immigrants, people of color, refugees, women, children, (people with) HIV/AIDS. Where the need is the greatest, the university should be there, especially[…]a public university” (2005).

Dr. Pellow’s work as an environmental sociologist helps him stay committed to the environmental field. “It’s a subfield that has a lot to offer and is unique,” he says. “On the whole, sociology as a discipline continues to ignore the relationship of humans and the environment, so as a sociologist, I feel I can do a lot.” He enjoys working on the margins of his disciplines and conducting “original work with a unique voice.” This includes his work in ethnic studies, a discipline that Dr. Pellow believes “has ignored the connection between humans, the environment, and communities of color.” He continues, “Of all fields, [ethnic studies] should be incorporating environmental justice, so again, I am on the fringe, but in a place I am comfortable” (2005).

Dr. Pellow’s work in San Diego pushed academic fields to reconsider their accountability to the communities in which they operate. He helped launch the International Campaign for Responsible Technology, a global network of scholars and activists working to address the technology industry’s environmental impact while producing original economic, sociological, and environmental research. The impetus for the campaign arose from the 2002 publication of Dr. Pellow’s book The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy.

While at UC San Diego, Dr. Pellow published several more books. In 2005, Dr. Pellow and Robert Brulle published Power, Justice, and the Environment: A critical appraisal of the environmental justice movement. Dr. Pellow continued his research on the environmental impacts of the technology industry. In 2006, he, along with Ted Smith and David Sonnenfield, published Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the global electronics industry. Finally, in 2007, Dr. Pellow published Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice.

In 2008, Dr. Pellow accepted a position at the University of Minnesota as Professor and Don A. Martindale Endowed Chair of Sociology. He was also a faculty affiliate for the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Also in 2008, Dr. Pellow, Kenneth Gould, and Allan Schnaiberg published The Treadmill of Production: injustice and unsustainability in the global economy. In 2011, Dr. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park published The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden.

In 2013, Dr. Pellow was a faculty research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. In 2014, he published Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement.

In 2015, Dr. Pellow left the University of Minnesota and returned to the University of California-Berkeley. He is a Professor, Environmental Studies Department Chair, and Global Environmental Justice Project Director at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Pellow teaches environmental justice, social justice, race/class/gender and environmental conflict, incarceration, human-animal conflicts, sustainability, social inequality, and social change movements.

Dr. Pellow considers a career highlight to be the affirmation he received from the people in the primary community organization featured in his 2002 book The Silicon Valley of Dreams. “The community activists are using it to fundraise and to boost their legitimacy,” he says. “That kind of affirmation from community activists who weren’t [upset] at me [believing I was] using it just to pad my own career but [happy] that they could use it as a tool” is all too rare.

Though Dr. Pellow retains legitimacy with many community-based organizations, he sometimes feels that he must fight for recognition as a relevant voice outside of academia, and those moments have been some of the lowest in his career. “Many times, whether it’s a team of scientists, GIS [(Geographic Information Science)] representatives, or people on a reservation, people outside the academy are trained to think only scientists can add value and knowledge and make a case to government or courts, and they look at me as a sociologist and can’t figure out what I’m adding to the conversation, so I’m often on the spot to make the case for what I do” (2005).

Dr. Pellow finds self-examination useful. “All too often, academics don’t have to make a case for what they do, and that can lead communities down the wrong path. We all need to be questioned!”(2005).