Jessica Worl

I graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. After college, I joined the Peace Corps, where I worked as an agroforestry extension agent in Guinea, West Africa, and as an aquaculture extension agent in Zambia. After an additional year when I lived at home and worked as a legal assistant, I attended the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where I received a Master of Public Policy. At the time, I was considering a career in international development, but I took a Political Ecology course and decided to attend the University of Michigan’s School of Environment and Sustainability to pursue a Ph.D. in Resource Policy and Behavior.

I describe myself as an antidisciplinary, environmental social scientist. I do not use antidisciplinary to suggest that I do not believe in the importance of academic disciplines; rather, the term recognizes how siloed academic disciplines can be from one another and indicates a resistance to the ways in which scholars within their fields can act as gate-keepers to ensure that these boundaries continue to exist. I strongly believe that complex questions require interdisciplinary approaches, especially when it comes to asking questions about, and conducting research on, human-environmental systems and environmental justice. My intellectual promiscuity means that I draw on the theoretical and methodological traditions across the natural, social, and humanistic sciences of ecology, environmental health, human environment geography, sociology, and anthropology to inform my research.

My doctoral research focused on women in artisanal and small-scale gold mining communities in western Kenya. This research investigates how informal miners navigate state- and development-driven policies meant to reform the informal mining sector, as well as how differently situated individuals within informal mining communities respond to risks posed by their working conditions, including exposure to the neurotoxin, mercury.

My recent research grapples with questions of equity in the American southeast as the United States adopts a green energy policy that is heavily dependent on renewable energy sources. I ask what new and renewed “sacrifice zones” may result because of these projects to center the tensions between, at times, seemingly opposing interests:  environmental and social justice and addressing our climate crisis.

I am excited to work with students and would happily mentor students who wish to work in western Kenya and the southeastern United States on portions of my broader research program. I prefer to begin working with students as early in their academic careers as possible so that they can gain the content, theoretical, and methodological training that will allow them to conduct careful and rigorous research related to these topics. I do require that students take, or be enrolled in, at least two of my classes before conducting research with me.

In my free time, I foster dogs from Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Animal Care and Control, while living with my eastern painted turtle (Bernie), and my resident dog (Kona). If you see me being walked by a giant, brown brindle with slobber oozing down his face, please say hi!

Teaching

• ENV 202: Environmental Social Science
• ENV 242: Political Ecology
• ENV 247: Critical Perspectives of Environmental Health
• ENV 320: Race, Gender, Nature
• ENV 345: Politics of Waste