Margaret Marietta Ramírez

MMR Bio

As a human geographer and interdisciplinary scholar, I broadly study social movements, racial and cultural geographies, inequality, and urban space.

My work explores the creative and cultural geographies of minoritized peoples in cities across North America. I engage with urban studies, Black, Latinx & Indigenous geographies, performance & sound studies, and cultural theories and texts to explore the ways that art and cultural practices inform theories of space and place. I consider what these creative and cultural texts can tell us about social and political struggles, and what they reveal about the systems that structure the city as well. Ultimately, in my research, praxis, and collaborations, I seek spaces of rupture and possibility to envision the world and our relations otherwise.

Since 2014, I have been thinking in relation with Michelle Daigle through our collaborative writing around themes of ‘decolonial geographies’. Asha Best and I have been in dialogue since 2015, thinking on themes of 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, currently serving as Co-Chair with Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes,  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 justice movements
• Cultural geographies
• Decolonial and anti-colonial geographies
• Feminist methodologies

Graduate Students:

• Tsatia Adzich, PhD Student, (2020-present)
• Joy Russell, MA Student, (2020-present)

Selected Publications:

Vasudevan, P., Ramírez, M.M., Gonzalez Mendoza, Y., and Daigle, M. (2022) Storytelling Earth & Body. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, online first: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2139658

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/

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/

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.

Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement. (2021)

Best, A. and Ramírez, M.M. (2021) Urban Specters. Environment and Planning D, 39 (6), 1043-1054.

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.

Daigle, M. and Ramírez, M.M. (2019) Decolonial Geographies. Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, 78-84. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12455