Professor Rachel Schurman
Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1993 University of Wisconsin Madison
Room 1078 Social Sciences
Office: 612-624-1039
E-Mail: schurman@umn.edu
Interest Areas:
Sociology of food and agriculture, social movements, political sociology, international political economy, environmental sociology, Latin America.
Current Research:
My current book project, Making Biotech History: Industry, Science and Social Activism, focuses on social resistance to agricultural biotechnology and how it has affected the development trajectory of genetically modified organisms. The book explores the significance of industry structures and activist and industry lifeworlds for the contemporary struggle over biotechnology.
Recent Publications:
“Ideas, Thinkers, and Social Networks: The Process of Grievance Construction in the Anti-Genetic Engineering Movement, ” with William Munro. 2006. Theory and Society,35(1): 1-38.
“Fighting Frankenfoods: Industry Structures and the Efficacy of the Anti-Biotech Movement in Western Europe.” 2004. Social Problems, 51(2): 243-268.
“Shuckers, Sorters, Headers and Gutters: Labor in the Seafood Sector.” 2004. Chapter in Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, Peter Winn, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
“Introduction. Biotechnology in the New Millennium,” in Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents. 2003. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents, edited withDennis Takahashi Kelso. 2003. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
“Uncertain Gains: Labor in Chile’s New Export Sectors.” 2001. Latin American Research Review, 36(2): 3-29.
“Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature,” with W. Boyd and W.S. Prudham. 2001. Society and Natural Resources, 14(7): 555-570.