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- 2023 Archives
- Scientists dig deep and find a way to accurately predict snowmelt after droughts
- Cracking the Case of Missing Snowmelt After Drought
- 2023 Esri Canada GIS Scholarship for SFU
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Daniel Murphy
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Kyle Kusack
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Matthew Taylor
- Anke Baker Wins Staff Achievement Award
- Spring 2023 Virtual Geospeaker Event with Ginger Gosnell-Myers
- CAG Paper Presentation Award - Congratulations to Alysha van Duynhoven!
- Informing & Engaging Urban Youth on Public Hearings: GEOG 363 Final Showcase
- Research Talk: Modeling Urban Wetland Complexities
- Highlight Paper: Quantifying land carbon cycle feedbacks under negative CO2 emissions
- Bright Addae winner of the 2023 SFU ECCE GIS Scholarship Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Jonny Cripps
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Diandra Oliver
- 2023 Geospeaker Presentation with Dr. Pauline McGuirk
- Congratulations to Our Graduates - October 2023
- Evaluating the impact of educational goals at SFU
- The Belongings of Precariously Housed People - A Report
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Takuma Mihara
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Adrienne Arbor
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Claire Shapton
- 2023 Distinguished Speaker Presentation with Dr. Deb Cowen
- Cheers to Paul Degrace and his well-earned retirement!
- 2024 Archives
- Professor Nicholas Blomley Honored with the Community-Engaged Research Achievement Award
- Graduate Students Claire Shapton and Marina Chavez Honored with the Community-Engaged Graduate Scholar Award
- Applications now open: 2024 ESRI Canada GIS Scholarship for SFU
- Associate Professor Rosemary Collard achieves 13th place on SFU Altmetric List
- The PEAK feature: GSU hosts inaugural RANGE conference
- Gabrielle Wong wins First Prize in 2023 Student Learning Commons Writing Contest
- Gabrielle Wong receives Warren Gill Memorial Award
- Professor Nick Blomley receives Warren Gill Memorial Award for Community Impact
- Geography Student Union recipient of the FENV 2024 Changemaker Awards
- Senior Lecturer Tara Holland reveals the secret sauce of great teaching
- Senior Lecturer Tara Holland Receives SFU 2023 Excellence in Teaching Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Bright Addae
- GIS undergraduate students participate in the Canada-wide 2024 AppChallenge competition
- Senior Lecturer Andrew Perkins Receives SFU 2024 Dean's Award of Excellence in Teaching
- Congratulations to Alysha van Duynhoven, Canada's 2024 ESRI Young Scholar
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Robert Ehlert
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Stephan Nieweler
- Eugene McCann writes on "livable cities" in The Tyee
- Tiana Andjelic wins the 2024 SFU ECCE GIS Scholarship Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Marina Chavez
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Mia Fitzpatrick
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Lan Qing Zhao
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Tyler Cole
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Benjamin Lartey
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Olivia Nieves
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Max Hurson
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to John Sykes
- Farewell to Robert "Bob" Horsfall, Associate Professor
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to André Araújo
- SFU Geography welcomes ethnobotanist, Leigh Joseph, as professor of Indigenous geographies
- Physical Geography September: What is Physical Geography?
- Alysha Van Duynhoven communicates award-winning research at international GIS conference
- How Dr. Tracy Brennand’s visionary leadership shaped the Department of Geography - a heartfelt thank-you
- Dr. Tracy Brennand honoured with the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Jay Matsushiba
- Human Geography October: What is Human Geography?
- MA Student Joy Russell featured on CBC Vancouver
- Human Geography October: What is Urban Worlds?
- Ajay Minhas Receives 2024 Warren Gill Award
- Dr. Nadine Schuurman featured in SFU news article on Runnability
- GIS Month: What is Geographic Information Science (GIS)?
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Joy Russell
- Hallway Screens Slides
- 2023 Archives
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MMR Bio
As a human geographer and interdisciplinary scholar, I study social and environmental justice movements, racial and cultural geographies, inequality, and urban space.
My research program weaves three primary threads. First, my work examines how racial capitalism and settler colonialism manifest spatially in cities across North America. Second, in relation to these broader structures of power, I explore the creative practices that Latinx, Black and Indigenous peoples engage to resist, reimagine and build within their everyday geographies. These creative practices take the form of organized social and environmental justice movements, artistic engagements, and everyday doings and refusals that activate urban space in distinct ways. Third, I engage modalities that call attention to histories and geographies of injustice and build relations between differently minoritized peoples, both methodologically and in practice. Across these threads, I employ urban, cultural and feminist theory, alongside critical spatial literatures, to build a robust analysis of urban space and urban life.
In 2023 I was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the research project ‘Gentrification, cultural politics & housing justice in Mexico City’. This research examines the increase of AirBnB units in Mexico City over the past five years, and how the financialization of housing and rapid increase in foreign remote workers in Mexico City have fueled the eviction and displacement of low-income residents in the Colonia Juarez neighborhood. In collaboration with housing justice organizer Sergio González of the organization 06600 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio de la Colonia Juarez, we are producing a series of digital maps that visualize the increase in AirBnB units alongside the number of evictions that have taken place in the neighborhood over the past 5 years. This project explores how issues of housing justice, like eviction and displacement, are intimately related to struggles for social and environmental justice, as well as to geographies of colonialism and territoriality in Mexico.
Since 2014, I have been thinking in relation with Michelle Daigle through our collaborative writing around themes of ‘decolonial geographies’ and radical relationality. Asha Best and I have been in dialogue since 2015, thinking on themes of art, haunting and the urban. Since 2017, I have been collaborating with the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, and I am a co-editor of the 'Indigenous Geographies of Resistance' chapter of AEMP's edited volume Counterpoints: A Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance with Savannah Kilner. I am also a founding member of the Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, and serve on the editorial boards of the Dialogues in Human Geography and cultural geographies journals.
Before joining the faculty at SFU, I served as a Creative Cities Fellow at Stanford University, and as a Lecturer in Urban Studies at San Francisco State University. I earned my PhD and MA in Geography at the University of Washington and my BA in Interdisciplinary Studies at UC Berkeley. My work has been published in Antipode, Environment & Planning D, Urban Geography, the Annals of American Geographers, Political Geography, IJURR’s Spotlight On series, and Planning Theory & Practice.
Research Interests:
- Race and urban space
- Black and Latinx geographies
- Social & Environmental justice movements
- Cultural geographies
- Decolonial and anti-colonial geographies
- Feminist methodologies
Graduate Students:
- Tsatia Adzich, PhD Student
- Joy Russell, MA Student
Selected Publications:
On race, urban space & liberatory struggles
- Ramírez, M.M. and Adzich, T. (2023) When Monuments Fall: anticolonial disruptions & decolonial urban practices. Urban Geography, 44 (6), 1084-1092.
- Ramírez, M.M. (2022) Policing, racial capitalism & the ideological struggle over public safety. International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, Spotlight on Racial Capitalism: https://www.ijurr.org/spotlight-on/racial-capitalism/policing-racial-capitalism-the-ideological-struggle-over-public-safety/
- Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement. (2021)
- Ramírez, M.M. (2020) Take the houses back/Take the land back: Black and Indigenous urban futures in Oakland. Urban Geography, 41(5), 682-693.
- Ramírez, M.M. (2020) City as Borderland: Gentrification and the Policing of Black & Latinx Geographies in Oakland. Environment & Planning D, 38 (1), 147-166
On cultural geographies, art & the urban
- Best, A. and Ramírez, M.M. (2021) Urban Specters. Environment and Planning D, 39 (6), 1043-1054.
On Latinx Geographies
- Ramírez, M.M. (Forthcoming, 2024) ‘Gloria Anzaldúa’. Entry in Key Thinkers on Space & Place [Third Edition]. Eds. Gilmartin, M., Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R., & Roberts, S. Sage Publications.
- Cahuas, M., Douglass-Jaimes, G., Faiver-Serna, C., Gonzalez Mendoza, Y., Martinez Lugo, D., Ramírez, M.M. (2023) Latinx Geographies: Opening Conversations. ACME 22 (6),1462-1489
- Zaragocín, S., Ramírez, M.M., García, M., and Gonzalez Mendoza, Y. (2022) Bilingual Intervention: Latinx and Latin American Geographies: A Dialogue. Antipode Online: https://antipodeonline.org/2022/08/08/latinx-and-latin-american-geographies/
On relationality & anticolonial praxis
- Ramírez, M.M. and Daigle, M. (2023) ‘Storying relations: a method in pursuit of liberation’, in V. Lawson et al. (eds) Abolishing Poverty: Towards Pluriverse Futures and Politics. University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA. p. 162-183
- Vasudevan, P., Ramírez, M.M., Gonzalez Mendoza, Y., and Daigle, M. (2023) Storytelling Earth & Body. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113 (7), 1728-1744.
- Daigle, M. and Ramírez, M.M. (2021) Space. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, eds. Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Amber Musser, Karma Chavez, Mishuana Goeman, Shona Jackson and Kyla Wazana Tompkins. New York: NYU Press, 217-221.
- Daigle, M. and Ramírez, M.M. (2019) Decolonial Geographies. Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, 78-84. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12455
Courses
This instructor is currently not teaching any courses.