Esther Sullivan's research focuses on poverty, spatial inequality, legal regulation, housing, and the built environment, with a special interest in both forced and voluntary residential mobility.
Esther is the author of the 2018 book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place. Manufactured Insecurity is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth investigation of the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents in U.S. mobile home parks. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions, the book examines the current state of housing insecurity for mobile home park residents and for all those attempting to hold on to housing they can afford in contemporary urban areas.
Currently, Esther and colleagues at the University of Colorado Denver have joined disaster researchers at Texas A&M on a National Science Foundation-funded study of disaster exposure and recovery in the mobile home park housing stock in the 9-county Houston Metropolitan Statistical Area following Hurricane Harvey.
She is also beginning a project that will trace the experiences of U.S. residents relocating across state lines for access to cannabis. The project follows those moving for marijuana due to Colorado's cannabis legalization. This project is based on interviews with and ethnography alongside self-termed marijuana "refugees" who move in search of medical treatments, precariously housed "rolling stones" who chose Colorado as a stopping point, and "cannabis capitalists" who move to emerging cannabis markets in search of profit.
Esther is the author of the 2018 book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place. Manufactured Insecurity is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth investigation of the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents in U.S. mobile home parks. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions, the book examines the current state of housing insecurity for mobile home park residents and for all those attempting to hold on to housing they can afford in contemporary urban areas.
Currently, Esther and colleagues at the University of Colorado Denver have joined disaster researchers at Texas A&M on a National Science Foundation-funded study of disaster exposure and recovery in the mobile home park housing stock in the 9-county Houston Metropolitan Statistical Area following Hurricane Harvey.
She is also beginning a project that will trace the experiences of U.S. residents relocating across state lines for access to cannabis. The project follows those moving for marijuana due to Colorado's cannabis legalization. This project is based on interviews with and ethnography alongside self-termed marijuana "refugees" who move in search of medical treatments, precariously housed "rolling stones" who chose Colorado as a stopping point, and "cannabis capitalists" who move to emerging cannabis markets in search of profit.