Austin Zeiderman

Austin Zeiderman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the cultural and political dimensions of urbanization and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a specific focus on Colombia. Motivating this work is a commitment to understanding hierarchical relations among different categories of humans, and how they underpin relations with the non-human world. His approach is interdisciplinary, engaging with geography, anthropology, environmental studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and Black studies.

Austin’s first book, Endangered City (2016, Duke University Press), examines the political imperative to protect life against future threats by focusing an ethnographic lens on the governance of environmental hazards (landslides, floods, and earthquakes) in the self-built settlements of the urban periphery. Based on twenty months of fieldwork in Bogotá, Colombia, Endangered City argues that urban political life is increasingly defined by logics of security and risk, especially for those at the margins. Austin has recently completed his second monograph, Artery, forthcoming with Duke University Press. The account foregrounds the plan to create a multimodal logistics corridor along Colombia’s Magdalena River—a rich site for examining the articulations of race, nature, and capital at the heart of the contemporary global order. Austin’s research has also appeared in Antipode, Public Culture, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, American Ethnologist, openDemocracy, and the Guardian.