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Erickson is a feminist ethnographer of labor. She currently has two projects: First, Tethers and Tight Spaces explores the navigational tools of people living in the United States during the Covid-19 Pandemic. She interviews adults who lived through the pandemic to learn about what temporary and lasting changes life in a pandemic inspired and demanded. She shares her second project — a two-year study of rent assistance in Iowa — with professors Tammy McGavock, Andie Hall, and Logan Lee of the Economics Department.

Erickson is also committed to a curriculum that addresses human lives in a machine age. Since 2017, she has been studying the social effects of cohabitating and collaborating with robots and AI. Her research on messy humans in a machine age have been published in Salon, Scientific American, and El Pais. Her research has examined mid-career malaise, the college-to-job pipeline, inclusive pedagogy, epistemic communities, and primarily pink-collar workplaces. For example, in , she studied Cheers-like community-building in a Tex-Mex restaurant; in , she explored meaning-making in elder facilities.

Erickson is also a licensed yoga teacher and dedicated meditator. Her first principles as an educator include a commitment to inclusive pedagogies such as ungrading, decentering white supremacy in the classroom, and teaching students not only the significant content of her disciplines — American Studies, Feminist Studies, English, and Sociology — but also the tools for being human in sustainable ways under conditions of surveillance capitalism. She lives these values by using the classroom as a space to practice community, fierce care of self and others, and to tend to the need for face-to-face connection, good humor, willingness to rethink, rest, and time to reflect.