Featured Faculty Member

Dr. Emily Ray’s research moves between two major themes: doomsday prepping and the new space race. She is interested in these political approaches to climate change as both presupposing a pending end time to life as we know it, and because the political urgency to contend with these challenges often forecloses democratic action. Her current project centers on the politics of doomsday prepping in the United States, offering a political theory of prepping that looks beyond individual methods and motivations and gets to the class and economic dimensions of its sustained prevalence in modern American society. Theorizing doomsday prepping through its history and current incarnation as a response to climate change addresses critical social issues through a robust theoretical analysis of trends in American politics that Dr. Ray hopes bring a new dimension to scholarship on climate change and politics.

When she is not reading up on doomsday, she enjoys hiking, gardening, baking, old movies, and watching very un-prestigious tv.

Dr. Ray spent the Spring semester of 2023 as a faculty fellow at the University of Heidelberg Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. At SSU, she was recently selected to be the Director of the Faculty Mentorship Program at Sonoma State. She is also currently the Internship Coordinator for the POLS department. You can catch up with her at emily.ray@sonoma.edu.