Caroline Faria - associate professor of geography - Ph.D., University of Washington, WA

My research examines 20th- and 21st-century nationalism, development and neoliberal globalization. I attend to the drivers and impacts of these processes and the connections between them. This research brings together longstanding and complex bodies of scholarship on each area. As a feminist geographer, I complicate our understanding by demonstrating how these processes are embodied. I use a feminist ‘global-intimate’ scalar lens to understand how neoliberalism, nationalism and development are tied to gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized geometries of power; grounded in colonial and postcolonial pasts; experienced unevenly; and lived in the everyday. In connection, I focus on undertheorized and typically marginalized people and places, most notably women and the region of East Africa. 

My current research project centers a collaboration with Dr Brenda Boonabaana (formerly in the Department of Forestry, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda, now at UT Austin). We are examining the role of global retail capital in driving urban development and displacement with a focus on a global south city at the cutting edge of urban change — Kampala, Uganda. I examine how and why global retail capital is transforming cities of the early 21st century, the spatial form that transformation is taking and its widely differential impacts on city residents and workers. Deploying a multi-scalar analysis, I link globalized capital investments from the United States, Gulf, Europe and China to the local political economies of Kampala, and examine the impacts on, and strategies of, resistance deployed by low-income female entrepreneurs. Finally, I will examine and assess effective strategies, developed by alliances of city residents and workers, city managers and international entities, to build more sustainable, safe and secure urban futures. 

My intersectional feminist scholarship is mirrored by my disciplinary activism around mentoring women and faculty and students of color. A central imperative of my work is to support women and minority geographers and those excited by geographic approaches but who may not see a place for themselves in the discipline. This work includes building and sustaining faculty-student and peer-peer mentoring networks for undergraduates, graduates and fellow faculty; mentoring around research, writing, publication and securing academic positions; and both writing on and practicing diverse geographic futures.

Under/graduate research

I co-founded and run the Feminist Geography Collective in our department. This effort brings together faculty, graduates and undergraduates from across UT (and beyond) who are interested in the relationship between power and place and who are committed to building diverse geographic futures. We are now part of a growing group of critical geographers organized in the Spatial Justice Lab and including the undergraduate Environmental Justice Collective. Please see the link for more details.