Justin Farrell

Environmental scientist and sociologist at Yale University, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Farrell's research examines the organizational and financial structures that produce scientific discourse polarization, with a focus on climate change denial, the role of corporate funding in shaping alternative narratives, and computational methods for analyzing large textual corpora.

Key papers

• Farrell (2016) — Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change — PNAS study combining Structural Topic Modeling on 40,785 texts with social network analysis of 164 contrarian organizations; demonstrates that corporate funding (ExxonMobil, Koch foundations) influences the actual thematic content of polarizing discourse, with funded organizations emphasizing energy-production-friendly and scientific-skepticism narratives over time.

Notes

Farrell's work bridges computational social science, environmental communication, and organizational sociology. His approach of linking textual discourse analysis with organizational funding networks and metadata-conditional topic modeling provides a methodological template for studying how private funding shapes public scientific understanding across multiple domains.