Jennifer Carlson is a Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She is also the Founding Director of ASU’s BRIDGS Initiative: Bringing Research and Innovation into the Debate on Guns in Society. Her award winning research examines the politics of guns in American life, including the experiences of gun violence survivors, police officers who enforce the country’s complex gun laws, gun sellers and retailers on the front lines of surges in firearm purchasing, and individuals who choose to own and carry guns.
She is the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford University Press, 2015), Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Public Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2023). Her scholarly articles have appeared in leading sociology and law and society journals, including American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Social Forces, and Law & Society Review.
Beyond academia, Carlson has contributed to public conversations about guns through a variety of platforms, including NPR, PBS, and the Aspen Ideas Festival, and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. She is currently the principal investigator on a Russell Sage Foundation-funded project examining the American gun experience. Her current book project, under contract with Liveright/Norton, is entitled “Loaded Conversations: How We End the Gun Debate.”