Allison Ford

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Advising Area

• General

Biography

My teaching focuses on culture and environment; climate change; environmental justice; human difference and domination, especially on the basis of gender, sexuality and race; social theory; and ethnographic methods. Prior to earning my PhD in environmental sociology, I studied international environmental policy and worked in the field of conservation. I have worked in California, Washington D.C., and Jordan. I left the world of policy convinced that we need more connections between theoretical and applied work. My teaching reflects a belief in the value of social theory in helping us understand the problems we are trying solve, and commitment to helping students bridge their academic and applied interests. 
In the classroom I aim to help students unpack assumptions we make about the disconnect between the human and the natural and to develop a less alienated, more complex relationship to society and nature. I firmly believe that we don’t have to choose between the two, and that our best hope for solving ecological crises is am embrace of the complex interplay between humans and our environment. I draw on feminist and embodied pedagogies to create dynamic classroom environments that are conducive for active student learning, and encourage students to develop their own curiosity about the world we share.
 

Education

PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon 2020
M.S., Sociology, University of Oregon 2015
M.A., International Environmental Policy, Middlebury Institute of International Studies 2009 
B.A., Literature/Writing, University of California, San Diego 2005

Academic Interests

I study the human dimensions of environmental crises with the goal of creating social change. My research and teaching are interdisciplinary, and draw on my training in environmental sociology, culture, women’s and gender studies, and international environmental policy. I use qualitative, ethnographic research, including participant observation and interviews, to ask how people in different social locations make sense of and respond to environmental risk related to climate change. I am especially interested in how people understand their environmental subjectivity, the lived experience of being embedded in an environment in a time and place as shaped by systems of power. Understanding the cultural dimensions of how people understand and make sense of environmental risk can inform an environmental politics that meets people where they are at.
My work is informed by interdisciplinary social scientific theory, with an emphasis on research questions that can be answered qualitatively. I find the depth and richness of ethnographic methods uniquely valuable for conveying the complex interplay between the social and the environmental in everyday life. Environmental ethnography and related work reveal the interconnections between the micro and the macro; the material and the cultural; the biological and the social. Intersectional feminist theory situates humans within interlocking systems of power and asks how the systems that produce environmental harm are reproduced at the expense of the most marginalized humans. I also draw on theories of practice that ask how those structures are produced and maintained within the context of global capitalist political economies and the state, and critical theories that critique the present and past in order to identify alternative, more socially just and ecologically sound futures.

Selected Publications & Presentations

Ford, Allison, 2021. '“They Will Be Like a Swarm of Locusts”: Race, Rurality, and Settler Colonialism in American Prepping Culture.' Rural Sociology. 86(3):469-493.

Ford, Allison and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2020. “Whose Everyday Climate Cultures? Environmental Subjectivities and Invisibility in Climate Change Discourse.” Climatic Change. 163(1):43-62.

Ford, Allison. 2019. “The Self-Sufficient Citizen: Ecological Habitus and Environmental Practices.” Sociological Perspectives 62(5): 627–645.

Ford, Allison and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2019. “Ghurba—A Longing for One’s Homeland” in An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. University of Minnesota Press.

Ford, Allison and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2019. “From Denial to Resistance: How Emotions and Culture Shape Our Responses to Climate Change” in Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives of Knowing, Being and Doing in a Climate Change World, edited by Hilary Geoghegan, Alex Arnall and Giuseppe Feola. Cambridge University Press.