Laura Harrison

Laura Harrison is an Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She was born in northern Wisconsin, received her undergraduate degrees in Women's Studies and Psychology at The University of Iowa, and her PhD in Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her forthcoming book, Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety argues that safe sleep rhetoric from medical experts, public health, commercial interests, and the media assign individual families the primary responsibility for infant health outcomes, at the same time that the state is taking a more visible role in policing and surveilling parental decision making, including criminalizing the parents of children who die in their sleep. The book analyzes co-sleeping and public health campaigns that aim to eliminate it, as well as the history of sleep safety advice, parenting philosophies about infant/child safety, and the market for safe sleep technology. Her first book, Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-racial Surrogacy (New York: NYU Press, 2016) considers what cross-racial surrogacy reveals about racial difference, kinship, and the racialization of reproductive labor. Her work on subjects ranging from surrogacy, reproductive justice, health inequalities, representations of motherhood, and gender and feminist backlash has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Signs, Feminist Formations, Genders, Feminist Media Studies, and Women’s Studies International Forum. Her analyses of gender and reproductive politics have also appeared in the Washington Post.