He has extensive international collaboration with co-workers in South Africa, Uganda, UK, Italy, USA and Sweden and he has lead interdisciplinary research groups with studies in Cape Town, New Orleans, Stockholm, Kampala and Luanda. He is the founder of The Situated Ecologies Platform in 2010 with Joshua Lewis and Jacob von Heland, which explores the spaces between art, science and environmental politics, and co-founder of the Situated Urban Political Ecology Collective (#SituatedUPE) with Mary Lawhon and Jonathan Silver. 

 

Before joining The University of Manchester he held research positions at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and their KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (2013-2018), at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University (2008-2013). He is a long-term Honorary Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town (2012--), where he also held a Formas Postdoc position (2010-2011). He was the Stig Hagström Postdoctoral Scholar at the History Department at Standford University (2013-2015). He has been invited as keynote speaker at conferences and seminars at various African, North American, and European insitutions, including University of Witwatersrand, University of KwaZulu-Natal, X!hodes University, Stanford University, University of Washington in Seattle, Université Paris-Diderot, Rachel Carson Centre, Università Roma Tre, amongst others. His PhD thesis in 2008 received the Swedish Head of State Award for excellent workd in environmental studies and in 2017 he received the French AXA Research Award for his “innovative work on urban sustainability in the global South”. 

 

• GEOG70952 Political Ecologies (Co-convenor, Postgrad/Masters)
• GEOG31211 Nature Society and Social Power (Co-convenor, Undergrad 3rd year)
• GEOG10191 Key Ideas in Human Geography (Lecturer, Undergrad 1st year)
• GEOG10251 Introduction to Human Geography 1 (Lecturer, Undergrad 1st year)
• GEOG10432 Introduction to Human Geography 2 (Lecturer, Undergrad 1st year)
• GEOG30702 Wildlife in the Age of Humans (Lecturer, Undergrad 3rd year). 

He has previously also taught and developed courses in urban ecology, ecosystem governance and the use of social network analysis in natural resource management. He developed the PhD course "Urban Ecology as Science Culture and Power" and "Social-Ecological Network Analysis." More recentely has convened (with Andrés Henao Castro) the PhD Winter School at University of Cape Town on "Democratic Practices of Unequal Geographies" that focused on Demos (2015), Politics and Aesthetics (2016) and The Polis (2017), structured as high-intesive reading of political theory with and against Southern urbanism.

 

He has supervised 3 PhD studens in urban environmental studies (from coastal ecosystem and infrastructrue politics in New Orleans (Joshua Lewis); nature conservation in postapartheid Cape Town (Marnie Graham); and urban waste management politics in South Africa (Kathleen Stokes, ongoing)) and many Masters and Honours theses. He has also hired, advised and collaborated with 7 Postdoctoral Fellows (Wangui Kimari, Ricardo Cardoso, Nate Millington, Suraya Scheba, Koni Benson, Mary Lawhon, and Anna Storm). He is keen to hear from students that have PhD projects that could strenghten research on urban political ecology, urban environmental movements, postcolonial urbanism, political theory/activism, and theoretical or practical studies on the relation between film- and text-based environmental research.