Alexa is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her current research focuses on the burgeoning diversity movement within the outdoors, as well as the challenges faced by non-hegemonic outdoor professionals in navigating the industry. She is also interested in the ongoing histories of religion, secularism, and colonialism in crafting outdoors practice, as well as the ways diverse peoples and their outdoors experiences might shift those histories into new forms of more-than-social belonging.

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She has previously conducted ethnographic research with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, writing about their legal efforts to reclaim cultural materials and reinter their ancestors, which had been disturbed and removed by a Washington State DOT project. She also has training in ethnographic and documentary photography and filmmaking. One of her favorite ways of combining her academic training and outdoors interests is giving talks to commercial rafting passengers, offering them a framework for understanding their roles and desires as outdoor consumers, the histories of how "wilderness" came to be in the United States, and the complexities and pain of access conflicts.

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As an advocate and activist working both within and outside of outdoor organizations to reduce exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and assault in the outdoors, Alexa is passionate about creating an outdoors where people are no longer harmed for being different. She has also been trained in trauma-informed approaches and in handling disclosures.