Jill Harrison (Ph.D. 2006, UC Santa Cruz) joined the Rural Sociology Department faculty in Fall 2006 as Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology. Harrison's interests include agrofood studies, environmental conflict, environmental justice, and immigration politics.
Her ongoing research interrogates the structural supports of environmental inequalities through examining political conflicts over agricultural pesticide drift in California. In this work, Harrison shows that predominant narrative framings of this environmental problem intersect with regulatory structure, regulatory practices, longstanding social inequalities plaguing farmworking communities, neoliberalism, news coverage, and contemporary agrofood politics in ways that both exacerbate the problem and naturalize inadequate regulatory response. This research also highlights social movement efforts to battle regional air pollution, including the construction of diverse coalitions, the pursuance of regulatory and legislative reform, and the conduct of lay environmental monitoring. Components of this research have been published in Political Geography in 2006, and her most recent article ("Abandoned Bodies and Spaces of Sacrifice") will be published in late 2007 in Geoforum.
Harrison's new research project focuses on immigration politics and the rise of the Latino immigrant labor force in Wisconsin agriculture. She is particularly interested in community reception of new immigrant populations, changes in the enforcement of immigration policy, and border politics.
Harrison is a faculty affiliate of UW-Madison's Program on Agricultural Technology Studies, and also of the Agroecology graduate program.
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CONTACT:
(608) 890-1370
harrison@drs.wisc.edu
352 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
