Jenna M. Loyd is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-1978 (2014, University of Minnesota Press) investigates everyday understandings of health and violence and people’s grassroots mobilizations for health and social justice. She is the co-editor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (2012, University of Georgia Press), which won the Past Presidents’ Award from the Association of Borderlands Studies. She and Alison Mountz published a book (University of California Press, 2018) on the late- and post-Cold War history of United States migration detention and border deterrence policy entitled Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States.
She has two current research projects. Geopolitics of Trauma is a feminist geographic project with Patricia Ehrkamp and Anna Secor, which was funded by NSF. It investigates how trauma, as a concept and set of practices, is mobilized in the refugee resettlement process. When we began the project, we set out to understand how trauma practices rework geopolitical relationships between the US and Iraq. We have increasingly focused on documenting significant shifts in the US refugee resettlement program.
My other current collaboration is a community-engaged video and mapping project on policing and meanings of justice in Milwaukee with Anne Bonds (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), documentary filmmaker Jenny Plevin, and Robert Roth in this department. Through this project we explore processes for creating new visual narratives and the implications these have for theorizing urban space and just geographies.