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 (in
press), 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
• Living in 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. 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.