Jessie Luna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. Her research investigates how cultural politics intersect with processes of capitalism to produce and naturalize social inequalities and environmental change. Her current research investigates how racial projects of modernity intersect with agricultural change, uneven wealth accumulation, and rural dispossession in the context of cotton farming in Burkina Faso. She has also studied embodied status politics among white runners in Boulder, Colorado. In both projects, she uses ethnographic methods to examine how the inequalities of neoliberal capitalism are produced and justified, drawing on theories of embodiment, culture, and status to tease out how people make sense of their own roles in (re)producing systems of inequality. Her research orients around the following sociological questions: 1) How do people justify inequality? 2) How do cultural processes secure consent or resistance to capitalism? and 3) The paradox of sustainable development: how do we balance desires for economic growth and "modernity" with ecological sustainability?

Before joining CSU, Dr. Luna earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Masters degree in “Global Ecology and Sustainable Development” from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. She lived in Europe for several years and worked as a bicycle tour guide in France. Before that, Dr. Luna served as an agriculture Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where she became passionate about the complex puzzles of sustainability, development, and global inequality. She speaks French and Bambara/Dioula.

Her research has appeared in the journals World Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Agrarian Change, Qualitative Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Agriculture and Human Values.