Jamie M. Sommer (Ph.D., 2018, State University of New York at Stony Brook) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Florida. Her research uses mixed methods to examine how institutional factors impact global inequality in environment and development outcomes. Broadly, she aims to highlight the complex ways that institutions, social structures, and social norms are historically biased toward groups with power and privilege derived from cycles of wealth and poverty.

In her research and teaching, Jamie is dedicated to throwing light on how institutions of power and norms and ideology perpetuate and reify social hierarchies and existing inequalities. She is especially interested in how narratives of capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, white supremacy, and the patriarchy, among others, impact human and environmental well-being. Her research, taken together, tells a larger story of how multinational corporations, international financial institutions, and other global neoliberal organizations facilitate deforestation, and other environmental and health issues, in low and middle-income nations. Using a cross-national perspective, she describes how powerful financial institutions target nations with the fewest economic resources, especially repressive nations, to extract the most natural resources possible with the least oversight, labor laws, and environmental protections. This research highlights the injustice inherent in many of the structures and systems that impact so many facets of our lives.