I am an applied cultural anthropologist who examines themes of environmental crisis, precarity, and cultural continuity and change from the perspective of political ecology. I have researched and published on related themes including environmental change and cannabis cultivation (2024), ecological crisis and migration (2021), natural resource extraction and disposable labor (2020), the effects of global climate change on health and somatic stability (2019), waste infrastructure and development (2018), ethnographic methods (2016), and unequal ecological exchange (2015). My international research programs in Andes-Amazonia and Central America center on how polluted waterscapes relate to people’s insecurity, instability, and well-being.

My current project builds conduits between landscape ecology, multispecies ethnography, and Indigenous studies to trace the social histories of biotic lifeforms in wildland-urban transition zones on California’s Redwood Coast, a region experiencing sea level rise at a faster rate than anywhere else on the West Coast. The question driving this research is: What can the social biographies of flora, fauna, fungi, and microorganisms in disturbed landscapes teach us about human precarity and survivance in this moment of climate crisis?

Personal website

Selected Courses Taught:

• Bear River Culture & Socioecological Change
• Critical Histories of Culture, Race, & Science
• Cultural Anthropology
• Ethnography
• People, Parks, & Power
• Wicked Problems of the Anthropocene

Education:

• Ph.D. Anthropology, The Ohio State University
• M.A. Anthropology, The Ohio State University
• B.A. Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin

Selected Publications:

• Ulmer, Gordon L., Dara Adams, Rhiannon Cattaneo, and Ricki Mills. 2024 "Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle: Zones of Multispecies Co-occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods" In Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More than Human World, Muhammad Kavesh and Natasha Fijn, eds. Routledge Press. 2024. 
  
• Ulmer, Gordon L. 2021  “Precarity, Migration, and Disposable Labor in the Peruvian Amazon” ( Pp 328-340). In The Handbook of Culture and Migration, Jeffrey H. Cohen and Ibrahim Sirkeci, eds. Edward Elgar Publishing. 2021.
• Ulmer, Gordon L. 2020. The Earth is Hungry: Amerindian Worlds and the Perils of Gold Mining in the Peruvian Amazon. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2):324-339.
• Crews, Douglas E, Nick Kawa, Jeffrey H. Cohen, Gordon L. Ulmer, and Ashley Edes. 2019. Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Allostatic Load. Annals of Human Biology 46(1):1-46.
• Kawa, Nick; Ulmer, Gordon L. and Sidney Silverstein. 2018.  A Pretext for Plunder: Environmental Change and State-led Redevelopment in the Peruvian Amazon. Anthropology Today 34(2):14-17.
• Ulmer, Gordon L. and Jeffrey H. Cohen. 2016. Ethnographic Inquiry in the ‘Digitized’ Fields of Madre de Dios, Peru and Oaxaca, Mexico: Methodological and Ethical Issues. Anthropological Quarterly 89(2):535-556.
• Ulmer, Gordon L. 2015. Gold Mining and Unequal Exchange in Western Amazonia. disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory 24:1-23.