About Me

I am a geographer and a political ecologist with an empirical focus on environmental politics and processes in African cities. I am currently pursuing two lines of inquiry. The first is the examination of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations (Lawhon et al. 2018) of waste and sanitation, including thinking through how such configurations work, are being reworked, and redistribute risk and power.  My second focal area is the politics of work and distribution in the context of green transitions and high unemployment. I am interested in the possibilities generated by cash transfers (including Universal Basic Income) to rework ongoing political ecological challenges and enable alternatives futures (Lawhon and McCreary 2020).  I also continue to be invested in clarifying and advancing debates about theorizing about and from southern contexts, including in my book Making Urban Theory. For more information about my research and teaching, please see my scholarly C.V.