The Urban Studies Foundation is excited to report that five new USF Postdoctoral Research Fellows will begin their positions in 2020. After the most popular call in the history of the scheme, a very competitive assessment process has resulted in five awards for fellows spread around the world, from the Americas to Europe and Australia. These fully-funded fellowships provide each early-career researcher with an opportunity to dedicate up to three years of work towards research programmes of their own design. Along with their mentors and host institutions, the USF looks forward to supporting each fellow and their research over the coming years and is delighted to announce them as follows:
Dr Naama Blatman-Thomas will be based at the University of Sydney, working with her mentor Associate Professor Kurt Iveson. Her research focuses on settler-colonial and Indigenous urbanisms in Israel/Palestine and Australia. Naama will undertake her upcoming research project in collaboration with the Deerubbin Local Aboriginal Land Council in Western Sydney. This project will probe the possibilities and challenges of urban decolonisation in a site of hyper-development and financialization.
Dr Max Holleran will also be based in Australia at the University of Melbourne. There he will continue to research on urban development in Europe and the United States, particularly how cities manage tourism and with a focus on “global greenbelts.” He will work with mentor Professor Alison Young, Francine V Mcniff Chair In Criminology at the University of Melbourne.
Dr. Camila Saraiva will be Postdoctoral Fellow at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) Laboratory for Urban and Regional Studies and Projects (LEPUR), in São Paulo, Brazil. Here she will work with mentor Professor Rosana Denaldi. She is an urban planner with interests in urban inequality, informal settlements, housing, comparative urbanism, (southern) urban theory and practices. Her current project is a transcalar comparison of the trajectory of slum upgrading policies and its results in São Paulo (Brazil), Medellin (Colombia), and Buenos Aires (Argentina).
Dr Callum Sutherland will work under the mentorship of Professor Chris Philo at the University of Glasgow on the urban geographies of Acid Communism. Through documentary analysis, participatory action research, and interviews with prominent activist academics, his research will explore the utility of Acid Communism as a way of framing urban activist praxis.
Dr Renee Tapp will be based in the USA at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Urban Planning and Policy. She is a geographer whose current work focuses on state restructuring, the privatization of public assets, and financial investment in real estate. Her mentor at the Department of Urban Planning and Policy will be Professor Rachel Weber.