Nathan McClintock, PhD
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Hello and welcome to my research website! I'm an urban geographer and Associate Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning at Portland State University and affiliated faculty in the Departments of Geography and Sociology. I'm on sabbatical in Montréal, Québec for the duration of the 2018/2019 academic year, splitting my time as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Geography, Planning & Environment at Concordia University and a Professeur visiteur in the Institut des sciences de l'environnement at the Université du Québec à Montréal, working with the AU/Lab. I serve as an elected board member of the Urban Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and was recently appointed as an editor of Urban Geography .
Broadly, I'm interested in the uneven development of cities, and what this means for people and the environment. My primary focus is on the relationships between urban agriculture, urban political economy, and social justice in North American cities, but I engage with wider debates in critical urbanism, urban political ecology, environmental justice, critical physical geography, food systems planning, and critical food studies. Click here for more on my research. I received my PhD in geography at UC Berkeley, where my dissertation focused on soil contamination and food justice in Oakland's flatlands, and a MSc from NCSU, where I conducted my research at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems. I've been involved in food systems work for more than two decades now, wearing a variety of hats along the way (researcher, trainer, Peace Corps volunteer, journalist, farm manager), with experience in the US and internationally (Canada, Mali, Senegal, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, Nepal, Bangladesh, France, Ireland). I continue to engage with a number of community partners through my teaching and research. Ironically, I discovered the city and became an urbanist through agriculture. The more time I spent in the field, the clearer it became that pathways to a more just and sustainable food system are rarely technical in nature. More often, they are social questions, entangled in power structures mediated by a suite of interconnected factors: political economy, race, class, gender, and settler colonial logics, among others. Studying urban agriculture opened my eyes to these relations, to the social and material processes shaping urban space and urban life, to flows and frictions of capital, to social movements and neighborhood change, to policy and planning that have little to do with food systems at first blush, but everything to do with what makes or breaks struggles for social and environmental justice in the city. Indeed, it is these struggles and the contexts in which they arise that have become my central focus. Urban gardens, in the end, were my gateway to something both much wider and deeper, and are now really just one window through which I view urban geographies. |
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