SSEHRI welcomes new core faculty Sharon Harlan, formerly Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University, now Professor of Health Sciences and Sociology at Northeastern University. Her research explores the human impacts of climate change that are dependent upon people’s positions in social hierarchies, places in built environments of unequal quality, and policies that improve or impede human adaptive capabilities. Focusing on excessive heat as a significant and increasingly critical threat to human health and well-being in cities, she studies urban landscapes in arid environments that produce unequal risks for people in neighborhoods divided by social class and race/ethnicity. Her approach is interdisciplinary, integrating social theories about the historical production of environmental injustices with data and models from the ecological, geospatial, and health sciences. Dr. Harlan was a co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program at ASU, where she led the development of a longitudinal metropolitan area survey on environmental attitudes and behaviors. She is beginning new multi-university, collaborative and comparative projects on urban heat and water challenges. Her research is published in a wide variety of interdisciplinary and disciplinary journals and she is co-author (with David Pellow and J. Timmons Roberts) of a chapter on climate justice in a new volume by the American Sociological Association Task Force on Climate Change (Dunlap, Riley and Robert Brulle (eds.) Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives, Oxford University Press, August 2015).
For more information, download Professor Harlan’s CV.