Sharon Harlan

Sharon Harlan is an Emeritus Professor of sociology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a senior sustainability scientist. Since arriving at Arizona State University in 1998, her research has explored 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. She studies the spatial structure of the urban heat island in desert cities of Arizona, how land cover mediates the relationship between social class and microclimate temperatures in urban neighborhoods, and how socio-environmental inequalities interact with heat hazards to create health risks for vulnerable populations and communities. This is transdisciplinary science that integrates social theories about the historical production of environmental injustices with data and models from the ecological, geospatial, and health sciences. She founded and directed the Phoenix Area Social Survey of the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program and has published widely in interdisciplinary and disciplinary journals, such as Environmental Health Perspectives, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Social Science & Medicine, Urban Studies, and Climatic Change.