Emily Ray

Office

Biography

Professor Ray joined the faculty at Sonoma State in Fall 2015. She received her doctorate from Virginia Tech and has previously taught at Northern Arizona University. Her expertise is in environmental political theory and politics, with particular interest in the intersections of climate change, technology, outer space policy, land-use disputes, and social theory.

Education

PhD, Virginia Tech

Concentrations

Environmental Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, Environmental Politics, American Politics

Selected Publications & Presentations

Ray, Emily, and Sean Parson. "Caelum Nullius: Outer Space and the Colonial Logic of Property Rights." Theory & Event 28, no. 1 (2025): 67-96. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2025.a947374. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54003

Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray, " Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States." Columbia University Press, 2024

Emily Ray (2021) Creature Comforts: Neoliberalism and Preparing for Disaster, New Political Science, 43:2, 171-188, DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2021.1906584

Emily Ray and Sean Parson, "Star Power: Outer Space Mining and the Metabolic Rift."  Limits to Terrestrial Extraction (ed. Robert Kirsch). Routledge Focus on Energy Series, 2020.

Sean Parson and Emily Ray. "Drill Baby Drill: Labor, Accumulation, and the Sexualization of Resource Extraction." Theory & Event 23, no. 1 (2020): 248-270.

Emily Ray, "Marginally Managed: ‘Letting Die’ and Fighting Back in the Oil Sands". Biopolitical Disaster (Ed. Sarah Marie Wiebe and Jennifer L. Lawrence). 2017. 

Emily Ray and Sean Parson, "Reimagining Radical Environmentalism". The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. (Ed. Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, John M. Meyer, and David Schlosberg). Oxford University Press, 2016.

Emily Ray (2021) Creature Comforts: Neoliberalism and Preparing for Disaster, New Political Science, 43:2, 171-188, DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2021.1906584