Ashley Ross-Wootton

Ashley Ross-Wootton studies how resilience is understood, practiced and developed on the local level. More specifically, she researches the intersection of public policy and public perceptions. Her past work has examined perceptions of accountability and decentralization policies, trust and electoral institutions, millennial immigration attitudes and the economic recession. Her research agenda is currently focused on disaster resilience, climate change, rural water issues and millennial political attitudes. Her work has been published in The American Journal of Political Science, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Electoral Studies and The Journal of Legislative Studies. Her book, Local Disaster Resilience, was published by Routledge in 2014. It systematically explores this question across the 75 counties adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico. Disaster resilience is defined as a set of adaptive capacities that imbue a community with the strengths needed to respond, cope and recover from a disaster event as well as a process of collective action enabled by these capacities to adapt to the post-disaster environment. This theoretical frame sets up resilience as a set of capacities and a process, which are examined in three ways, as: 1) an adaptive capacities index, 2) perceptions held by EMs, and 3) collective action in response to and recovery from disasters. Ross teaches courses in environmental policy, disaster resilience, environmental dispute resolution and environmental management. She holds a BA in both political science and speech communications from Texas A&M University, an MA in political science from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. in political science from Texas A&M University.