Yousuf Al-Bulushi
Department of Global and International Studies
University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
Yousuf’s research interests are in comparative anti-systemic movements, urban geography, political theory, African and African Diaspora Studies, and global capitalism. His current projects explore the afterlife of apartheid geographies in the city of Durban, South Africa, the intellectual history and geography of the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the post-2011 uprisings across Africa and the Americas.
Teo Ballvé
Peace and Conflict Studies
Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA
Read MoreTeo’s research is focused on the political ecology of the drug war and violent conflict in Colombia. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell University Press, 2019). Teo also writes about Latin American affairs for a variety of journalistic media outlets.
Joshua Barkan
Department of Geography
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Josh teaches geography and social theory at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on the role of law in the construction of capitalism and its implications for concepts of politics, sovereignty, justice, and personhood. Much of his work has focused on the corporation and corporate power. His first book, Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government under Capitalism, was published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Patrick Bigger
Lancaster Environment Centre
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Patrick researches the ways that capitalism tries to manage its socioecological contradictions by making nature investable or governable in new ways. He has studied carbon markets, green bonds, for-profit biodiversity conservation, and multilateral development bank programs using an array conceptual approaches to explain the operations of state/finance entanglements for decarbonization, climate adaption, and landscape restoration. His secondary research program is on the geopolitical ecology of the US military, melding critical geopolitics with political ecology to explore how US imperialism operates on and through nature. Now based at Lancaster University, he is a co-founder of the Dimensions of Political Ecology conference.
Adam Bledsoe
Department of Geography, Environment and Society
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Adam’s interests revolve around the African Diaspora and the various political struggles of Diasporic populations. His work attempts to chart the overlaps and divergences of anti-Blackness, Black critique, and Black political movements in the Americas. He has conducted qualitative work in Brazil and the United States but is more broadly concerned with connecting Black intellectual and political developments across the entire Western Hemisphere. He teaches at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Sophie Bond
School of Geography
University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand
Sophie’s teaching and research explores how groups and communities struggle for and gain meaningful democratic involvement, self-determination and justice in the context of change. In particular, she is interested in the different tactics and labour involved in creating spaces that contest and disrupt structural injustices to open opportunities for change. Most recently this work has focused on different dimensions of climate justice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sophie and colleagues have worked with climate justice activists contesting deep-sea oil. She has also explored how community development and a politics of care can enhance climate change adaptation at governance and community levels.
Rachel Brahinsky
Urban and Public Affairs
University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Rachel’s research and teaching center around race-class struggles and the spaces of cities. Rachel is assistant professor and director of USF’s Graduate Program in Urban Affairs. She researches and writes about race and redevelopment, gentrification and urban growth, and is particularly interested in modes of urban development and economic investment that refuse to participate in human/social displacement.
Michelle Buckley
Department of Human Geography
University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada
Michelle is an urban and economic geographer whose interests revolve broadly around the political economy of contemporary urbanization. This work has mainly sought to map how arrangements governing work and employment underpin real estate investment. Grounded in the United Arab Emirates, India and Canada, her research has explored the (re)production of racialized and gendered hierarchies of labour in the production of the built environment and the circuits of debt, credit, equity and paid and unpaid labour that structure both property regimes and household economies.
Brett Christophers
Department of Social and Economic Geography
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Brett’s research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urban political economy; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”.
Veronica Crossa
Centro de Estudios Demográficos, Urbanos y Ambientales
El Colegio de México, Ciudad de México, Mexico
Veronica is a human geographer with a regional interest in Latin America. Her research lies at the intersection between urban, political, and critical geographies. Most of her research has focused on power and resistance in context of urban change. More specifically, she is interested in how urban excluded groups negotiate and struggle over changing configurations of power in their every day lives. Her research is qualitative in nature and she has conducted different types of qualitative techniques for her projects. From 2007-2013 Veronica was a lecturer in geography at University College Dublin in Ireland.
Ayona Datta
Department of Geography
University College London, London, UK
Ayona’s research and writing focuses broadly on the gendered processes of citizenship and belonging and the politics of urbanization. She uses interdisciplinary approaches from urban sociology, feminist and critical geography, focussing broadly on the connections between social, political, and gendered geographies of cities and urban spaces. She is author of The Illegal City (2012, Ashgate), and co-editor of Translocal Geographies (with Katherine Brickell, 2011, Ashgate) and Mega-urbanization in the Global South (with Abdul Shaban, under contract). She has also produced two short documentaries, City Bypassed (13 mins) and City Forgotten (15 mins), exploring issues of urban citizenship in India’s small and mega-cities.
Juan De Lara
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Juan De Lara is a human geographer whose research focuses on social justice, urban political ecologies, and the intersections between data, race, and power. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he is the founding director of the Latinx and Latin American Studies Center. Juan is the author of Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California (University of California Press, 2018). His articles and essays have appeared in publications including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, and the Labor Studies Journal.
Kate Derickson
Department of Geography, Environment and Society
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Kate’s work is concerned with cultivating the conditions in which historically marginalized communities in the US and the UK can meaningfully imagine and engender alternative socio-natural futures. She has worked closely with communities in post-Katrina Mississippi, West Atlanta, and the Govan neighborhood of Glasgow, and published on topics including the co-constitution of neoliberalism and race, the inadequacy of “resilience” for social justice seeking politics, scholar-activism, and feminist epistemology. She is currently working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists to better understand the intersections between green infrastructure, property values, and gentrification.
Michael Ekers
Department of Human Geography
University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada
Michael mobilizes social and political theory and political economic approaches to understand the making of different environments including forestscapes and alternative agrarian spaces. His current research develops the concept of the “ecological fix” to examine the relationship between urban unemployment and the making of regional reforestation infrastructure in British Columbia. He also investigates the growth of unwaged labour on agroecological farms in Canada and the significance of this labour question for the food movement. Finally, Michael has a sustained in interest in the social and political theory of Antonio Gramsci and what his work might mean for debates on nature and social difference.
Adam Elliott-Cooper
Applied Sociology
University of Greenwich, London, UK
Adam’s research focuses on policing and resistance to it, with a particular interest in British policing. Using an historical perspective, Adam’s conceptual approach investigates how imperial policing shapes racism and state power in the metropole. Other strands of Adam’s research interests include gentrification, racist/anti-racist cultures and black internationalism.
Julie Guthman
Social Sciences Division
University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA USA
Julie’s research has broadly been about the origins and character of efforts to transform food production and distribution, especially as they confront race, class and bodily difference. She retains an abiding interest in the history and geography of California agriculture, with recent publications addressing the California strawberry industry’s dependence on highly toxic soil fumigants. Her newest project is exploring Silicon Valley’s foray into food and agricultural technology as a means to address the food system’s “grand challenges”.
Sam Halvorsen
School of Geography
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Sam is interested is in the relationship between territory and grassroots activism with a particular focus on Latin America. Having previously researched (and participated in) social movements in the UK, his recent empirical work has focused on political party activism in Latin American cities, particularly Buenos Aires. Theoretically, he seeks to build greater dialogue between Latin American and Anglophone debates on spatial politics, especially in relation to territory and territorial activism, something he has taken forward as founder and chair of the Latin American Geographies Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society.
Ryan Holifield
Department of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Ryan is interested in issues of justice, democracy, governance, and the politics of knowledge production as they pertain to processes of environmental change. Empirically, his research has addressed environmental justice policy in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the politics of risk assessment within tribal lands, the politics of brownfields redevelopment, inequities in volunteer activity in urban parks, and the dynamics of democratic participation in the restoration of urban waterways and estuaries. Theoretically, he is particularly interested in the relationships and tensions between critical/radical urban political ecology and actor-network theory, as well as science and technology studies more broadly.
Mark Hunter
Department of Human Geography
University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON Canada
Mark’s first major project, on the history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa, was critical of studies that separated sexuality from political economy but also of instrumental approaches to the embodiment of inequalities in “Africa” – a continent long seen as diseased and loveless. His more recent research explores the politics of schooling desegregation in South Africa. He is the author of Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Indiana University Press, 2010) and Race for Education: Gender, White Tone, and Schooling in South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Sara Koopman
School of Peace and Conflict Studies
Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA
Read MoreSara is a critical collaborator in international solidarity movements, particularly those in North America who work for peace and justice alongside Latin American movements. Her focus is on colonial patterns in these relationships, and how activists with privilege might work to decolonize them. Her past work looked at these dynamics in the movement to close the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas and the World Social Forum. Her current work focuses on international protective accompaniment in Colombia and the paradoxes involved the way this tactic uses passport privilege to ‘make space for peace’.
Mazen Labban
Department of Geography
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA
Mazen’s research interests are in critical social theory, philosophies of space/nature, natural resources and extractive industry, and finance. He is currently conducting work on the historical-geographical relations between urbanization, mining and waste; and on the biopolitics of labour in contemporary capitalism. Mazen is an editor at Capitalism Nature Socialism and Human Geography.
Mary Lawhon
School of GeoSciences
University of Edinburgh, UK
Read MoreMary is a political ecologist whose interest lies in combining postcolonial theory/theory from the South with work in African cities. She is part of the Situated Urban Political Ecology collective, a group of researchers seeking to ground urban political ecology in new contexts with openness to theorizing from the South. Mary is also interested in bringing such ideas into the classroom, including rethinking how we teach urban geography in the global South to make it both more relevant and engaging for students in the global South. Empirically, she has worked on issues of alcohol regulation, waste governance and housing, primarily in the South African context.
Stephen Legg
School of Geography
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Read MoreStephen’s research focuses on interwar India and explores the intersection of urban politics, internationalism, and imperial governmentalities. He has deployed various theoretical perspectives as archival methodologies for exposing the excesses and neglects of colonial government, the spatial tactics of anticolonial nationalism, and the scalar constitution of the brothel as a target of “civil abandonment”. His current and future work explores Subaltern Geographies (University of Georgia Press, 2019) as a precursor to writing a comparative historical geography of anticolonialisms in India’s capital city, Delhi. This will examine the mass social movements, intimate domesticities, and community neighbourhoods of violence and non-violence, communism and Hindu/Muslim communalisms, from the 1920s-1940s.
Jenna Loyd
Geography Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
After completing her PhD in Geography at University of California, Berkeley, Jenna held postdoctoral fellowships in the Humanities Center at Syracuse University, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and with the NSF-funded Island Detention Project led by Dr. Alison Mountz. Her first book, Health Rights Are Civil Rights (2014, University of Minnesota Press) investigates everyday understandings of health and violence and people’s grassroots mobilizations for health and social justice. Her second area of research concerns the criminalization of migration and US immigration detention policy. She is the co-editor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages (2012, University of Georgia Press). She and Alison Mountz are currently co-authoring a book on the late-Cold War history of the US immigration detention system.
Geoff Mann
Centre for Global Political Economy & Department of Geography
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Geoff teaches political economy and economic geography. His research generally focuses on the politics of ideas, on which theories get to make sense of the world, why, and with what implications. He is currently concerned with the legitimization and delegitimization of violence.
Siobhán McGrath
Department of Geography
Durham University, Durham, UK
Siobhán is interested in work, labour and employment, particularly: [i] forced/unfree labour (and related concepts); [ii] degrading conditions of employment, precarious work, and unregulated work; and [iii] labour within Global Production Networks. She is also interested in Brazil’s role as a Rising Power as it relates to South-South globalisation and development. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Development Policy and Management. She will be starting a research project on forced labour and trafficking in supply chains in 2014, as part of a wider research project (funded by the European Commission, and led by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development) on ‘Addressing Demand in Anti-Trafficking: Efforts and Policies’.
Claire Mercer
Department of Geography and Environment
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Claire is a human geographer working at the interface of human geography and African Studies. She has published research on the roles of NGOs, civil society and the African diaspora in development, and the relationship between the middle class and suburban space in Africa. She is currently working on a book manuscript on suburban Dar es Salaam.
Jerónimo Montero Bressan
Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales
Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
Jerónimo is an economic geographer with special interest in the garment industry. He is working on the relationship between the crisis of capitalism, changes in the map of clothing production and supply since 2008 and working conditions in the sector. He is currently involved in a large project that looks to develop new theoretical insights to study Latin American economies through a revision of the Marxist theory of dependency.
Sarah Moore
Department of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Sarah’s research areas are urban geography, postcolonial studies and development, and space and social theory (including Marxian, post-structural and psychoanalytic approaches). She has conducted research projects on the politics of waste in Oaxaca, Mexico and the history of urban gardening in the United States. She is currently investigating the transnational trade of hazardous waste in North America, its implications for issues of environmental justice, and shifting understandings of regulatory regimes in critical legal geography.
Rohit Negi
School of Human Ecology
Ambedkar University Delhi, Delhi, India
Rohit’s interests span critical social theory, urban studies and political ecology with a regional focus on Southern Africa and India. Current projects concern the tension-laden geographies of extraction in a Zambian mining enclave, and dynamic urban ecologies in Delhi. Rohit is also engaged in multiple initiatives aimed at enhancing capacities for African Studies in Asia and Asian Studies in Africa.
Christine Noe
Department of Geography
University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Christine’s research is on conservation and development politics. Her recent work has focused on conservation partnerships, transfrontier conservation areas and rural livelihood changes. Using border and space theories, her work seeks to explain how local and international development politics influence rural land use, tenure and security dynamics in Tanzania. She is the author of “Regionalizing Tourism through Transfrontier Conservation: Implications for Local Development in Southern Africa” (The African Review, 2020); “The Berlin Curse in Tanzania: (Re)making of the Selous World Heritage Property” (South African Geographical Journal, 2019); and co-editor with Dan Brockington of Prosperity in Rural Africa? (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Christine is based in Tanzania where she is also involved actively in providing leadership in research collaborations and mentorship for young African scholars.
Peter North
Department of Geography and Planning
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Pete has a long standing interest in social movements, utopias and alternative economic experiments. He is the author of two books on alternative currency movements, focusing on radical financial experiments in the UK, New Zealand, Hungary and Argentina. His current research focuses on radical local economic development strategies in the Anthropocene from a diverse economies perspective, with a particular focus on the UK and Poland.
Neethi P
IIHS, Bengaluru
Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India
Neethi’s interests pertain to globalisation and informal labour. Striving to understand the nuances of everyday labour relations, Neethi focuses on women informal workers and various forms and responses from upcoming alternative labour associations, exploring intersections of caste, class, gender, and urbanity, within informal work. Neethi’s research has covered sectors including garment, electronics, ports, home-based work, street vendors, sanitation workers, mill workers, and sex workers. She was a Fulbright DPR visiting scholar at the University of Georgia in the United States during her doctoral study. Neethi has authored Globalization Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Her upcoming co-authored book focuses on neoliberal urban transition and the everyday challenges of street-based sex workers in Bangalore, based on ethnographic work.
Haripriya Rangan
School of Geography
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Priya’s research interests include the environmental history of plant exchanges around the Indian Ocean World, with particular emphasis on pre-European plant transfers between Africa, India, and Southeast Asia; the political ecology of acacia exchanges between Africa, India, and Australia during the 19th and 20th centuries; the political ecology of weeds and invasive plant management; and the economic and social geographies of marketplace trade of medicinal plants in southern Africa.
Malini Ranganathan
School of International Service
American University, Washington, DC, USA
Malini’s work is concerned with how urban environmental injustices are shaped by histories of property, race, and caste. She draws on critical theory, history, and ethnography to study the politics of water and sanitation, land and housing, and flooding and climate change vulnerability in India and the US. Her recent publications in academic and public venues have examined the history of colonial property regimes in urban India, caste and urban segregation in Bengaluru, and environmental racism and abolitionist climate justice in Washington, DC. She is also finalizing a book manuscript that brings humanistic inquiry to bear on how urban dwellers apprehend, narrate, and act on “corruption” related to urban space.
Ashanté Reese
Department of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
Ashanté works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces and places in the context of anti-blackness. Animated by the question, who and what survives?, much of her work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity.
Paul Routledge
School of Geography
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Paul’s research interests include critical geopolitics, climate change, social justice, civil society, the environment, and social movements. In particular, his research has been concerned with two key areas of interest: the spatiality of social movements in the Global South and Global North; and the practical, political and ethical challenges of scholar activism. Paul is currently conducting research into resource sovereignties in collaboration with peasant farmers’ movements in Bangladesh and the international farmers’ network, La Via Campesina. He is the author of Terrains of Resistance (1993, Praeger); co-author (with Andrew Cumbers) of Global Justice Networks (2009, Manchester University Press); co-editor (with Joanne Sharp, Chris Philo and Ronan Paddison) of Entanglements of Power (2000, Routledge); and co-editor (with Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby) of The Geopolitics Reader (1998; 2006, Routledge).
Omar Jabary Salamanca
Department of Conflict and Development Studies
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Omar’s work lies at the interface of human and political geography. His current research deals with spatial modalities of settler colonialism and uneven development in Palestine. In particular he looks at the ways in which the materialities of infrastructure networks are co-produced and how they advance and sustain political and socio-economic segregation in practice. He is also interested in aid and development intervention, geographies of resistance and solidarity, and the Middle East.
Hyun Bang Shin
Department of Geography and Environment
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Read MoreHyun Bang is an urbanist with research interests in the critical analysis of the political economy of urbanisation with particular attention to cities in Asian countries such as Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea and China. He has been writing about the politics of urban redevelopment, displacement and gentrification, real estate speculation, the right to the city, and mega-events as urban spectacles. His most recent project on circulating urbanism has also brought him to work on Ecuador. His most recent books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016) and Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015), both edited with Loretta Lees and Ernesto López-Morales. Other forthcoming books include The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia (Routledge) and Making China Urban (Routledge).
AbdouMaliq Simone
Urban Institute
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Read MoreAbdouMaliq is an urbanist with particular interest in emerging forms of collective life across cities of the so-called Global South. He has worked over the past four decades as a researcher, consultant, planner, program director, and policy analyst in many cities of African and Southeast Asia. He is also interested in alternative methodologies of analysis which emerge from the heterogeneous instantiations of black peoples in urbanization processes.
Gabriela Valdivia
Department of Geography
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Gabriela’s interests include political ecology and critical resource geography (particularly, extractive economies), the cultural politics of oil, and environmental movements. Her ethnographic work focuses on natural resource governance in Latin America: how Latin American states, firms, and civil society manage and transform resources to meet their interests and how, in turn, capturing and putting resources to work transforms cultural and ecological communities. Gabriela is co-author, with Flora Lu and Néstor Silva, of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which addresses the political ecology of the Ecuadorian petro-state since the turn of the century.
Joel Wainwright
Department of Geography
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Joel teaches political economy and social theory at OSU. His research examines environmental change, development politics, and Marxist philosophy.
Kevin Ward
School of Environment, Education and Development
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Kevin is an urban and regional political economist. Over the last decade or so he has been working on how those who govern cities are seeking out ways of making urban futures more calculable and predictable, and what this means for the relational comparisons that underpin contemporary urban policy-making.
Megan Ybarra
Department of Geography
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Read MoreMegan’s research and writing is on race, transnational Latinx migrations and environmental justice. She is the author of Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest (University of California Press, 2017) on Q’eqchi’ Maya land activism in the context of Guatemala’s drug war criminalization. In partnership with NWDC Resistance, she has published “A Hunger Strikers Handbook” in English and Spanish and a bilingual documentary short called, “Hunger Strikes: A call to end immigrant detention”, detailing the activism of detained immigrants in Tacoma, WA, USA.
Sofia Zaragocin
Relaciones Internacionales
Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador and Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador
Sofia’s research focuses on decolonial feminist geography at a hemispheric scale. She teaches critical geopolitics at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador and is part of the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador. Particular interests include the relationship between Latinx geographies in the US and critical feminist geographies in Latin America; decolonizing feminist geographical methods; collective geographical knowledge construction and mestizo place-making across the Americas.