ALWRI welcomes Social Scientist, Jaclyn Rushing

Jaclyn is a social scientist who focuses on outdoor recreation, parks, and protected area management with a specific interest in relevance, diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is energized by relationships with practitioners, stakeholders, and fellow scientists. Jaclyn has worked for municipal, state, and national parks and has a background in basic and applied mixed-methods and multi-disciplinary research. She believes that multiple approaches allow more nuanced understanding of complex social phenomena and uses quantitative and qualitative methods, spatial analysis, netnography, and historical research. Jaclyn’s past work includes understanding relationships among resident constraints, visitation, and place attachment to urban parks, case studies of gentrification results of urban park development, gendered experiences and approaches to mountaineering and glaciology, effects of social media on tolerance of wolves, and several monitoring studies on visitor use and experience in national parks, Wilderness, and Wild and Scenic Rivers. Jaclyn is thrilled to join ALWRI to support equitable and inclusive Wilderness stewardship into future.  

Jaclyn received her B.A.’s in Environmental Studies and Romance Languages from the University of Oregon, Robert D. Clarke Honors College and an M.S. in Forest Ecosystems and Society from Oregon State University. Jaclyn is finishing her Ph.D. in Forest and Conservation Sciences from University of Montana. Her dissertation focuses on social media-based affinity groups in the outdoors (e.g., Latino Outdoors, HERE Montana), and how they successfully foster relevant, diverse, and inclusive narratives and spaces in wildlands.