C. Taylor Brown

I’m a fifth-year PhD candidate in Social Welfare and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, where I study climate adaptation, welfare states, and inequality. I’m the founding Executive Director of the Ecosocial Center, and I’m on the academic job market for 2026–27.

Research

Welfare states are increasingly being pressed into service as climate adaptation infrastructure—a domain I call ecowelfare. My research asks how that happens, who benefits, and what it costs. The central tension: programs designed to help people recover from disasters can also cycle repair back into growth, commodifying land and labor in the name of resilience while leaving behind the communities most exposed to risk.

A distinctive feature of my work is a dual methodological commitment. I use causal inference, spatial econometrics, and computational text analysis to build policy-relevant evidence at scale; I use critical theory to ask what our welfare categories, data systems, and administrative rules are built to see—and what they systematically miss. These aren’t competing toolkits—they’re the same analytic move.

My dissertation, When Helping Hurts: Growth, Adaptation, and a Critique of Ecowelfare, develops this framework across three empirical studies: computational analysis of national adaptation plans, cross-national typologies of ecowelfare states, and quasi-experimental analysis of U.S. disaster programs. The argument is that ecowelfare is structurally two-faced—capable of reproducing growth-as-adaptation, or of enabling genuinely care-centered provision within ecological limits.

Current projects:

• Adapting the Safety Net: Do U.S. disasters reshape enrollment in TANF, SNAP, UI, and Medicaid—and do climate-adapted programs absorb or amplify those shocks?
• Do Welfare States Adapt?: Text-as-data analysis of whether national adaptation plans route climate risk through welfare versus infrastructure, insurance, or individual responsibility
• The Divided Ecowelfare State: How corporate disaster philanthropy and federal relief form a bifurcated public–private ecowelfare system across major U.S. disasters
• Statecraft: A computational tool I’m building to scrape, classify, and summarize legislation across every level of U.S. government using open large language models—turning a notoriously diffuse policy landscape into an analyzable corpus

Teaching

I teach across the social work curriculum—social welfare policy, macro practice, research methods, and program evaluation—and, distinctively, statistics, data science, and computational methods in Python and R. I’ve been recognized with UC Berkeley’s Teaching Effectiveness Award and Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award (both 2026), and I mentor actively: students I’ve worked with have recently won a national NSF fellowship, doctoral admissions, and department-level awards.

I came to this work through practice. I’m a social worker by training, with experience in legislative work, federal policy, and direct service, and I founded the Ecosocial Center from a conviction that research should reach people, not just journals.

When I’m not writing or teaching, I’m with my spouse, friends, and our Labrador, Indigo. I grew up near Paragould, Arkansas, and I love rock climbing, pottery, painting, poetry, travel, and exploring new wines and teas.

Let’s connect. I’m always interested in collaboration, speaking invitations, and conversations about ecosocial policy and climate justice.