Research

Dr. Ford’s main body of research focuses on self-sufficiency movements; cultural movements in which individuals seek to minimize their reliance on institutions like the industrialized food system, municipal water systems, and the electric grid. Her research includes ethnographic study of homesteaders and preppers, groups who adopt similar environmental practices, despite major differences in their political cultures. Her research on self-sufficiency movements considers how people who are relatively privileged within American society make sense of environmental risk. While homesteaders and preppers are both critical of dominant social paradigms that produce alienation from the environment, they channel their concerns about social and environmental risk into individual, household level practices, rather than seek institutional change. Dr. Ford explores the implications of these practices for the reproduction of unequal distribution of environmental power and resources.

A key theme in Dr. Ford’s research on self-sufficiency is the centrality of emotional management in generating environmental practices that are culturally consistent with participants’ pre-existing worldviews and the social networks they are embedded in. She explores the relationship between culture and emotions, and their effects on environmental practices in collaboration with her mentor, Dr. Kari Marie Norgaard in several published works.

Dr. Ford’s scholarship has been recognized in the form of numerous fellowships, including a Sandra Morgen Public Impact Graduate Fellowship from the University of Oregon, a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Wayne Morse Center of Law and Policy, and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Center for Environmental Futures at the University of Oregon.