Jill Harrison

Jill Lindsey Harrison (PhD, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on environmental sociology, sociology of agriculture and food systems, environmental justice, and political theories of justice, with a regional emphasis on the United States. She has used her research on political conflict over agricultural pesticide poisonings in California, recent escalations in immigration enforcement in rural Wisconsin, and government agencies’ environmental justice efforts to help identify and explain the persistence of environmental inequalities and workplace inequalities in the United States today. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she published Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2011), which won book awards from the Rural Sociological Society and the Association of Humanist Sociology, and From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies (MIT Press, 2019), which received Honorable Mention for the 2020 Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology.

Selected Publications

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2019. From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Received Honorable Mention for the 2020 Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology.

Niles, Skye, Shawhin Roudbari, Santina Contreras, Jill Lindsey Harrison, and Jessica Kaminsky. 2020. “Resisting and Assisting Social Engagement in Engineering Education.” Journal of Engineering Education 109(3): 491-507.

Contreras, Santina, Skye Niles, Shawhin Roudbari, Jill Harrison, and Jessica Kaminsky. 2020. “Bridging the Praxis of Hazards and Development with Resilience: A Case Study of an Engineering Education Program.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 42: 101347.

Ciplet, David, and Jill Lindsey Harrison. 2020. “Transition Tensions: Mapping Conflicts in Movements for a Just and Sustainable Transition.” Environmental Politics 29 (3): 435-456. Finalist for 2020 Environmental Politics’ Article of the Year Award.

Dillon, Lindsey, Christopher Sellers, Vivian Underhill, Nicholas Shapiro, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Marianne Sullivan, Phil Brown, Jill Harrison, Sara Wylie, and the “EPA Under Siege” Writing Group. 2018. “The EPA in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture.” American Journal of Public Health 108 (S2): S89-S94.

Fredrickson, Leif, Christopher Sellers, Lindsey Dillon, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Nicholas Shapiro, Marianne Sullivan, Stephen Bocking, Phil Brown, Vanessa de la Rosa, Jill Harrison, Sara Johns, Katherine Kulik, Rebecca Lave, Michelle Murphy, Liza Piper, Lauren Richter and Sara Wylie. 2018. “History of U.S. Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection.” American Journal of Public Health 108 (S2): S95-S103.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2017. “’We Do Ecology, Not Sociology’: Interactions among Bureaucrats and the Undermining of Regulatory Agencies’ Environmental Justice Efforts.” Environmental Sociology 3(3): 197-212. 

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2016. “Bureaucrats’ Tacit Understandings and Social Movement Policy Implementation: Unpacking the Deviation of Agency Environmental Justice Programs from EJ Movement Priorities.” Social Problems 63(4): 534-553.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2015. “Coopted Environmental Justice? Activists’ Roles in Shaping EJ Policy Implementation.” Environmental Sociology 1(4): 241-255. Winner of the 2017 Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey, and Christy Getz. 2014. “Farm Size and Job Quality: Mixed-Methods Studies of Hired Farm Work in California and Wisconsin.” Agriculture and Human Values 32(4): 617-634.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2014. “Neoliberal Environmental Justice: Mainstream Ideas of Justice in Political Conflict over Agricultural Pesticides in the United States.” Environmental Politics 23(4): 650-669.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey, and Sarah E. Lloyd. 2013. “New Jobs, New Workers, and New Inequalities: Explaining Employers’ Roles in Occupational Segregation by Nativity and Race.” Social Problems 60(3): 281-301.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey, and Sarah E. Lloyd. 2012. “Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration Enforcement.” Antipode 44(2): 365-385.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. “Parsing ‘Participation’ in Action Research: Navigating the Challenges of Lay Involvement in Technically Complex Participatory Science Projects.” Society and Natural Resources 24(7): 702-716.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Winner of the 2012 Fred Buttel Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award, Rural Sociological Society, and Winner of the 2012 Association of Humanist Sociology Book Award. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/pesticide-drift-and-pursuit-environmental-justice