Shefner Named College’s First-Ever Herbert Family Professor of Excellence
Professor Jon Shefner was named the Herbert Family Professor of Excellence in August 2023. He is the first scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences to hold this endowed professorship, which recognizes a distinguished career of teaching, research, and service.
He served as head of the department for ten years and has held the title of Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of Social Science. He was the founding director of the Global Studies Interdisciplinary Program. He is also a Fulbright Scholar whose long and remarkable research record in social justice, social movements, globalization, political economy, and green economic development has made him an internationally recognized and trusted scholar in these areas of sociological inquiry. Much of his research in Latin America and in Southern Appalachia is motivated by his life-long commitment to fairness, diversity, and democratic principles needed to create public policies and educational programs that are effective and just.
Shefner is an award-winning teacher, editor, and author who has written nine books and scores of journal articles and book chapters. His published work is often collaborative, helping graduate students with their professional socialization, and always seeks to highlight the political message in his scholarship. He is also a public-facing scholar, publishing editorials and serving as subject expert for many news stories.
Shefner’s activist and organizing history began while he was a master’s student at Colorado State University in the mid-1980s, where he contributed to organizing against US interventionism in Latin America and led a successful anti-apartheid divestiture campaign. After earning his degree in 1986, Shefner continued his work supporting Central America into the 1990s, followed by a shift in academic and organizing attention to Mexico. He spent nearly two years on the outskirts of Guadalajara studying a community organization struggling for utilities, pavement, and democracy, which led to his book published in 2009, The Illusion of Civil Society. Shefner followed this work with a Fulbright scholarship to Ecuador, where he worked along with one of the main Indigenous opposition social movements, CONAIE.
He recently created the master’s program in applied sociology, which focuses on educating students for action in movements, unions, think tanks, and other applied efforts toward social justice. This program just graduated its first two students and is recruiting more. Shefner is currently the lead on a grant from the Ares Foundation aiming to foster equitable economic development and he serves as senior personnel on several NSF grants. In his grant-funded work, his focus is on inclusion of community organizations and organized labor.
Shefner currently serves as the founding director of the Community-University Research Collaborative Initiative (CURCI), a university and community-wide program that fosters community-engaged research. Now in its second year, the program provides support for faculty across the university to collaborate with community organizations to bring university expertise to meet local needs.
The project was designed by Shefner to bring innovation and collaboration to the larger society to lead to a more just and sustainable future. With the support of Lecturer Lisa East, CURCI is currently working on 12 different projects. He continues to write articles and chapters in the areas of equitable economic development, organizing, and political economy.