International Advisory Board

The work of the Editorial Collective is supported by our indispensable IAB…

Alexandre Baia, Centro de Estudos Africanos, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Moçambique

Alexandre is a researcher in the Centre of African Studies and a professor in the Department of Geography in the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences. As well as being a member of the team that developed the feasibility study of telecentres in Mozambique, he has carried out evaluation works of development projects and implemented programs of community development. As a social researcher he is interested in urban development, with a particular focus in the reduction of social injustice and expansion of urban conditions in rural communities. He has carried out studies of urbanization processes in Mozambique, and gives classes on the production of urban spaces, and on urbanization more generally.

Amita Baviskar, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India

Amita works on the cultural politics of environment and development, with a focus on social inequality and natural resource conflicts, environmental and indigenous social movements, anthropology of development, urban environmental politics, and state formation and the environment in south Asia.

Solomon Benjamin, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India

Solomon is Associate Professor at the NIAS. His research interests include city economy, land, politics, and poverty. He has led teams as part of several international research projects on issues of chronic poverty, governance, and land.

Patrick Bond, School of Development Studies and Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Patrick’s work presently covers political ecology (especially energy, water and climate change), political economy and capitalist crisis, social mobilization, public policy and geopolitics. Patrick received his training in economic geography at Johns Hopkins.

Jenny Cameron, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia

Jenny is interested in the ways people are taking back the economy, and developing ethical economic practices in response to concerns about economic and social inequalities and environmental degradation. Jenny’s current work is with food-based community initiatives including community supported agriculture and community gardens. Her work is characterised by a participatory action research approach, and the production of resources that communicate to a wide audience. She is a member of the Community Economies Collective.

Julie Cupples, Institute of Geography (School of Geosciences), University of Edinburgh, UK

Julie has a long-standing political and scholarly involvement working with civil society organizations in Central America. Her research deals primarily with the relationship between political culture and popular culture, focusing in particular on development/postdevelopment, media and new technologies, critical geopolitical imaginaries and the construction of cultural citizenship.

Eduardo Gudynas, CLAES (Latin American Centre for Social Ecology), Montevideo, Uruguay

Eduardo’s research and activism focuses on the interactions between development and environment in Latin America. These include current development strategies and their social and environmental impacts, the role of the New Left, and the positions among civil society movements. It also includes the exploration of alternatives, particularly those presented as “buen vivir” (well being), Nature’s rights, redefinitions of justice (such as the distinction between environmental and ecological justice), and transitional pathways to post-extractive strategies.

Efraín León Hernández, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México

Efraín’s interests in geography’s theoretical field are based on Marxist social critique. His researches have focused on the processes of Latin-American spatiality, its formal and real subordination, as well as its dynamic behaviour in the structural whole of objective social relations, geopolitics, and class struggle.

Bettina van Hoven, Department of Cultural Geography, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Bettina’s research interests include geographies of youth and older people and in particular the relationship between place, identities and wellbeing. She has worked on the meanings of the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada which resulted in the production of a documentary (‘A forest for the future’) as well as writing about multi-sensory experiences and landscape. Her work has been published in Area, Environment and Planning D and Journal of Rural Studies.

Sara Koopman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada

Sara 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’.

Hille Koskela, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, Finland

Hille’s research interests include fear of violence in cities, urban security politics, culture of fear, video surveillance and the politics of control, the emotional experience of being watched, and most recently, webcams as voluntary visual representations on the Internet.

Mazen Labban, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, USA

Mazen’s research interests are in critical social theory, philosophies of space/nature, political economy of natural resources and extractive industry, development, geopolitics, and finance. He is currently conducting work on labour and financialisation of the oil industry; international law and the development of the doctrine of sovereignty over natural resources; and the employment of micro-organisms in metal extraction.

Marcelo Lopes de Souza, Departamento de Geografia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Marcelo is interested in spatial theory, social movements theory (focusing especially the spatial dimension of urban social movements dynamic), urban ‘utopias’/alternative visions, urban problems, and the ‘spatiality of libertarian thought’ (classical anarchism, neo-anarchism, autonomism). His research projects cover themes such as urban violence and the ‘militarisation of the urban question’ in different countries, potentialities and limits of ‘participative urban planning’, and the spatial practices of urban social movements in Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.

Peter North, Department of Geography, University of 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, focussing on radical financial experiments in the UK, New Zealand, Hungary and Argentina. His current research focuses on radical local economic development strategies as a response to climate change and peak oil, and on local climate change activism.

Mario Novelli, Department of Education, University of Sussex, UK

Mario is interested in critical political economy approaches that explore the intersection between processes of globalisation and international development. He’s currently working on two areas. The first explores the new geopolitics of international development assistance and particularly the merging of security and development in the education sector and its implications. The second explores globalisation and labour movement strategies in the South, with a particular focus on how trade unions are learning to operate on a range of scales from the local to the global. He also has a strong interest in ethnographic research methods, Michael Burawoy’s extended case method and different forms of politically engaged research.

David Naguib Pellow, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, USA

David has three substantive research interests: environmental justice studies; race and ethnic studies; and social movement theory. Most of his research focuses on the intersections of social inequalities and environmental politics in communities of color and among aggrieved and/or despised social groups.

Jenny Pickerill, Department of Geography, University of Leicester, UK

Jenny is interested in how collective action, participation, spaces for dialogue, autonomy and anarchism can create pathways towards environmental and social justice. In particular she has written about the use of internet technologies for (environmental and anti-war) campaigning, Indigenous politics in Australia, and autonomous geographies through the case example of eco-building projects across Britain.

Mary Roche, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland

Omar Jabary Salamanca, Middle East and North Africa Research Group, Ghent University, 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.

Nathan Sayre, Department of Geography, University of California-Berkeley, USA

Nathan works at the interface of political economy, ecology and history, exploring the relations between capital, the state, and biophysical environments from the industrial revolution to the present. He focuses on arid and semiarid rangelands, especially in the southwestern USA, combining ethnographic, historical, and ecological methods. Additional research interests include urbanization, climate change, and scale. Nathan was trained as a social anthropologist at the University of Chicago, did postdoctoral research with the US Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, and is presently an affiliated researcher with the Jornada Experimental Range Long-Term Ecological Research site in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Tatiana Schor, Geography Department, Federal University of Amazonas-Manaus, Brazil

In recent years I have been curious about urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon, so I have focused my empirical and theoretical work trying to understand the urban dynamics in the western section of the Amazon basin, looking at the impacts of urbanization-modernization in small cities; questioning the impacts and consequences to local-urban populations of economic-development programs, of scientific research agendas on climate change and biodiversity conservation and consequent changes in alimentary habits. I have also focused much of my work in increasing critical capabilities undergraduate geography students in the region, introducing them into critical empirical and theoretical research.

Nik Theodore, Center for Urban Economic Development and Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Nik’s research agenda is focused on problems of socioeconomic inequality arising from the restructuring of urban economies. Grounded in community development practice, his research seeks to combine primary data collection and analysis, policy assessment and evaluation, and theory-building to illuminate the complex (and often contradictory) processes that give rise to economic hardship in urban communities.

Kevin Ward, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, UK

Kevin has four substantive research interests: [i] policy transfer and the assembling of urban politics; [ii] state restructuring and urban and regional political economy; [iii] the changing nature and regulation of work and employment; and [iv] the urban and regional politics of economic development and social reproduction.

Wendy Wolford, Development Sociology, Cornell University, USA

Wendy’s interests include: the political economy of state power and development; agrarian studies; social movements; political ecology; land tenure; and social and economic geography.

Fulong Wu, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK

Fulong has the following research interests: China’s marketization and ‘neoliberal’ urban transformation; urban poverty in China; housing and land development; and urban and regional governance with reference to ‘entrepreneurialism’ and critiques in China.

Oren Yiftachel, Geography Department, Ben Gurion University, Israel

Oren teaches political geography, urban planning and public policy at Ben-Gurion University. He has worked on critical theories of space and power; minorities and public policy; and ‘ethnocratic’ societies and land regimes. He is currently working on three main research projects: the spatial transformation of Israel/Palestine; the geography of ethnocratic power structures; and the various shades of the ‘grey city’ using a comparative international perspective.