Laura Barraclough

Laura Barraclough is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College. She teaches courses on urban sociology, prisons and public policy, and the sociology of racism. She also directs the Public Policy and Urban Affairs concentration. Prior to joining the faculty at Kalamazoo College, she was Core Faculty in the Liberal Studies department at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she focused her energies on the development of a new interdisciplinary Urban Community and Environment concentration. Dr. Barraclough received her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from USC in May 2006. She is now revising her dissertation for publication as a book manuscript entitled Rural Urbanism: Geographies of Whiteness in Los Angeles, which explores the surprising influence of ideologies about rural land upon urban planning in suburban LA. Drawing together archival, ethnographic, and landscape analyses, Rural Urbanism argues that investments in rural landscapes have created and sustained white privilege in Los Angeles into the twenty-first century. She was recently awarded the Los Angeles Westerners Fellowship of the Autry National Center in order to conduct archival research essential to the project’s completion. Professor Barraclough is also co-author (with ASE faculty Laura Pulido and doctoral student Wendy Cheng) of the forthcoming A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, an alternative tour guide that features sites of political struggle, oppression, and resistance in the city’s everyday landscapes. Articles based on Dr. Barraclough’s research have recently appeared or will soon appear in the Western Historical Quarterly, Professional Geographer, Progress in Human Geography, and Progressive Planning.