Brenda Wilson

Biography

Brenda K. Wilson, PhD is an Assistant Teaching Professor at UC San Diego’s Department of Ethnic Studies and Global Health Program (joint appointment). Her research and teaching focus primarily on health disparities, with an emphasis on structural violence, the role of power, and the impacts of social determinants on people’s health. Dr. Wilson’s methodology is ethnographic and qualitative and draws inspiration from the values of community-based participatory research. She has conducted photo-ethnographic fieldwork with Haitian migrant farmworkers in the Dominican Republic (2019) and with migrant farmworkers in India (2010) to examine how health inequalities are experienced and produced through historical, social, ecological, and political-economic factors. Her current research program ethnographically examines the health and geographic trajectories of asylum seekers and migrants from around the world who are crossing the US-Mexico border. Her other areas of teaching and research include precarious employment, critical race and gender studies, postcolonial science and technology studies, climate change and environmental health, short-term experiences in global health (STEGH), and social justice pedagogy and curricula. Dr. Wilson has her PhD in the Medical Humanities from the University of Texas Medical Branch, MA in Natural Resources and Environmental Management from the University of Manitoba, a BS in Human Biology from Texas State University, and completed her postdoctoral training at the Global Health Program at UC San Diego.