People

Dr. Kate Derickson

Kate is an Associate Professor in the department of Geography, Environment, and Society, Director of Urban Studies and the managing editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.  Her work engages political economy, critical race theory and feminist epistemology to explore the politics of knowledge production and the relationship between scholarly knowledge and emancipatory social change.  

Dr. Gabe Schwartzman

Gabe is a an assistant professor in the  Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. His research focuses on rural economic development and current projects investigate the future of Appalachian communities in the wake of the decline of the coal economy.   

Kevin Ehrman-Solberg

Kevin was the co-founder of Mapping Prejudice and critical member of the Praxis Lab, the CREATE Initiative, an avowed socialist and a leading force for justice in the Twin Cities during his brief but spectacular life.  His work and purpose  lives on in ours everyday, and we miss him terribly. 

Dr. Robin Wright

Robin is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Core Teaching Fellow at Boston College.  She earned her PhD in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota in 2021.  Her work engages critical race theory, legal geography, and settler colonial studies to explore the contemporary relationship between legal discourse , white privilege  and land in the West.

Dr. Aaron Mallory

Aaron is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Geography and African American Studies at Florida State University.  He earned his PhD in Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota in 2020. His work pivots around black studies, feminist knowledge production, and health to explore the relationship between HIV/AIDS prevention, black LGBTQ communities, and health care  in the United States South.  

Dr. Eric Goldfischer

Eric is the Research Manager at WIN (formerly Women in Need), New York City's largest provider of transitional and supportive housing. He is also a Visiting Scholar at NYU's Urban Democracy Lab.  He earned his PhD in Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota in 2020. Working closely with homeless activists in New York City, his work explores the relationship between visuality, homelessness, and ongoing green development projects in urban areas.

Dr. Sage Ponder

Sage is an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota department of Geography, Environment & Society. Her work considers the intersection of finance, racial capitalism, and urban political ecology to understand how the two largest municipal bond market bankruptcies in US history - Puerto Rico and Detroit, MI – are reinscribing racialized conditions of socio-ecological crisis onto urban futures. Alongside this, her research also deals with the ways these conditions are being resisted or contested, and with what scope for emancipatory change.