Jill Williams is the Principal Research and Evaluation Manager at Acacia, where she supports the Attorney Recruitment Project and oversees the execution of research and evaluation projects to drive internal and external policies aligned with Acacia’s mission.

Before joining Acacia, Jill was a faculty member at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona. Jill has researched US border and immigration enforcement for over 15 years, leading projects on a range of issues including state responses to migrant deaths, family detention and release practices, and the use of multi-media information campaigns to dissuade migration attempts. At the University of Arizona, Jill also served as the Director of the Women in Science and Engineering Program and the lead program evaluator on several foundation and federally funded projects aimed at fostering diversity, inclusion, and equitable workforce development. As a researcher and program evaluator, Jill enjoys using social science methods to understand problems and support positive change-making. Jill holds a PhD in Geography from Clark University and MA in Women’s Studies from the University of Cincinnati. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, she now resides in Tucson, Arizona and enjoys hiking, camping, and yoga.

Recent publications include: 

Coddington, K., & Williams, J. M. (2024). Feminist Periscoping and Feminist Data Visualization: Strategies for Analyzing and Disseminating Messy Data. The Professional Geographer, 1-9.

Coddington, Kate, and Jill M. Williams. “”Relational enforcement: The family and the expanding scope of border enforcement.”” Progress in Human Geography 46, no. 2 (2022): 590-604.

Williams, Jill M., and Kate Coddington. “”Transnational Affective Circuitry: Public Information Campaigns, Affective Governmentality, and Border Enforcement.”” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113, no. 10 (2023): 2376-2391.

Williams, Jill M., and Kate Coddington. “”Feminist periscoping in research on border enforcement and human rights.”” Journal of Human Rights 20, no. 1 (2021): 143-150.

Williams, Jill M. “”Crisis, subjectivity, and the polymorphous character of immigrant family detention in the United States.”” Territory, Politics, Governance 5, no. 3 (2017): 269-281.

Williams, Jill M., and Vanessa A. Massaro. “”Managing capacity, shifting burdens: Social reproduction and the intimate economies of immigrant family detention.”” In Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention, pp. 87-104. Routledge, 2016.