Dr. Allison Ford (she/her or they/them) is an interdisciplinary environmental scholar. She current serves as an Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University with a joint appointment in the Anthropology Department and the Department of Geography, Environment and Planning (GEP). She also teaches courses in the Sociology Department and Women's and Gender Studies and is an affiliated faculty member of Sonoma State's Cultural Resources and Heritage Management Graduate Program. Dr. Ford's work draws on qualitative methods, primarily ethnographic, to explore how people in different social locations make sense of environmental risk, particularly climate change. She is especially interested in the relationship between structural inequality, culture, emotions, environmental practices and the reproduction of environmental privilege.
Dr. Ford currently has two research projects underway. Her work on prepping and self-sufficiency as forms of environmental practice has been published in several articles, and is culminating in a book length project, forthcoming. She is also in the early phases of an ethnographic and interview based study that explores the development of trust between conservationists and agricultural land-users as they navigate a changing climate in California. Trust between individuals and institutions while navigating environmental changes is a central theme in Dr. Ford's work.
Research and teaching interests include enviroment, climate change, gender, race, culture, emotions, consumption, social theory, particularly intersectional feminist theory, and qualitative and ethnographic methods.
