Plenary & Guest Speakers

Plenary Speakers and Guest Speakers will engage discussion and thought around the theme – Spaces and Flows in a Time of Economic and Political Uncertainty

Plenary Speakers

Loretta Lees

Loretta Lees is currently Professor of Human Geography at King’s College London. She has a PhD in Geography from the University of Edinburgh (1994). Her previous posts have been Reader in Geography, King's (2005-2008), Senior Lecturer in Geography, King's (2004-2005), Lecturer in Geography, King's (1997-2004), Post-doctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada (1995-1997) and Visiting Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Waikato, New Zealand (1994).

She has served/is serving on the following editorial boards: City and Society (2010-present) Dialogues in Human Geography (2009-present). Geography Compass (2006-present) Environment and Planning A (2002-present) The Canadian Geographer (2004-2006) ACME: an international e-journal for critical geographies (2003-2006)

Loretta is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College. She served on the Research Committe of the RGS-IBG (2004-2007). She was Chair of the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group (2000-2003) and a committee member of the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group (1998-2000).

Loretta co-organises (with Jenny Robinson, Matthew Gandy, Monica Degen, Abou Malique Simone and Hyun Bang Shin) the Urban Salon: a London forum for architecture, cities and international urbanism (www.theurbansalon.org).

Gordon MacLeod

Dr. Gordon MacLeod is a senior academic and Reader in the Department of Geography at Durham University in the UK. His research interests include Politics-State-Space, Social/Spatial Theory, and Urban Worlds. His papers include works published in Urban Studies, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Environment and Planning. He is also the co-author of State/space: A Reader (Blackweel 2002). In addition to his own research, he is also the supervisor to seven MA and PhD students in the Department of Geography.

Guest Speakers

Jan Nijman

Jan Nijman is Professor of Urban Studies and director of the Centre. He also chairs the undergraduate programme in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. Trained as a geographer (PhD, U of Colorado at Boulder, 1990), his interests reach across the social sciences and humanities. Most of his work deals with urban theory and the role of cities in their broader regional and historical contexts. His regional expertise is in North America and South Asia, with special interests in Miami and Mumbai. He has 15 years of research experience in urban India. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (USA), National Geographic Society, Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Current research projects focus on the rise and fall of US suburbs (part of a larger collaborative and comparative project on global suburbanism) and on the economic and cultural geographies of slums in Indian cities.

Nijman is chair of the Global Exploration Fund (Europe) of the National Geographic Society and he is Professor Emeritus in Geography at the University of Miami. He was a recipient of the Nystrom Award for best doctoral dissertation in Geography in the United States (1991) and he is a former Guggenheim Fellow.

David Wilson

David Wilson is currently investigating projects pivoting around the political economy of the U.S. city. Specific projects examine the politics of urban growth regimes in Midwest cities, the politics of competing discursive formations that generate gentrified neighborhoods and poverty communities, and the racializing of the contemporary urban issues of crime and city growth. At the moment, he serves on the editorial boards of Urban Geography, Professional Geographer, Social and Cultural Geography, Syracuse University Press (Society, Space, and Place Book Series), Inter-Cultural Studies, the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography project and Acme: International Journal for Critical Geography.