Brynna Jacobson

Brynna Jacobson teaches as part-time faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. Her recent book examines the evolution of notions of normalcy, legitimacy, and imperative around the contested field of geoengineering through critical discourse analysis of relevant science policy reports, news media journalism, and congressional hearings. Outside academia, Professor Jacobson also has experience consulting, editing, and working in the non-profit sector in the fields of environmental conservation as well as international development, including having run a fellowship program for university students to get hands-on field experience in microfinance in Guatemala and Mexico.

• Environmental Sociology
• Political Economy
• Discourse Analysis
• Law & Society

• UC San Diego, PhD in Sociology, 2018
• University of San Diego, MA in Peace & Justice Studies, 2005 
• UC Berkeley, BA in Peace & Conflict Studies, 2004

• Recipient of the Best Paper Prize for 2017-2018 by the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (AsJCL), a Cambridge University Press journal, for the paper “How Global is the Common Law?"

• Brynna Jacobson. 2022. Geoengineering Discourse Confronting Climate Change: The Move from Margins to Mainstream in Science, News Media, and Politics. Lexington Books.
• Charles Thorpe and Brynna Jacobson. 2021. “Abstract Life, Abstract Labor, Abstract Mind.” Pp. 59-105 in The Capitalist Commodification of Animals. Eds. B. Clark and T.D. Wilson. Research in Political Economy, Volume 35. Bingley, UK: Emerald. 
• Brynna Jacobson. 2018. “Constructing Legitimacy in Geoengineering Discourse: The Politics of Representation in Science Policy Literature.” Science as Culture 27(3): 322-348. 
• Kwai Hang Ng and Brynna Jacobson. 2017. “How Global is the Common Law? A Comparative Study of Asian Common Law Systems – Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore.”  Asian Journal of Comparative Law 12(2): 209-232. 
• Charles Thorpe and Brynna Jacobson. 2013. “Life Politics, Nature, and the State: Giddens’ Sociological Theory and The Politics of Climate Change.” The British Journal of Sociology 64(1): 99-122.