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Faculty Affiliates

2025/2026 Faculty Affiliates

Teresa Abbruzzese is an urban geography and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Her teaching and research interests focus on the social, spatial, and material dimensions of cities and urbanization processes. Her current theoretical and empirical preoccupations focus on urban dimensions relating to digital futures and policy mobilities. Her research brings a critical feminist lens to current scholarly and policy discussions on smart cities by highlighting questions of care and social infrastructure in relation to the production of technocratic urbanism.
S. Harris Ali is an expert in social aspects of infectious diseases, environmental disasters, environmental health, and environmental sociology. He is also a professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Department of Sociology, at York University.
Alison Bain is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and is the Graduate Program Director of the Geography program at York University. She is a feminist urban social geographer who studies contemporary urban and suburban culture. Her research examines the complex relationships of cultural workers and LGBTQ2S populations to cities and suburbs in Canada and Germany with particular attention to questions of identity formation, place-making, spatial politics, and neighbourhood change. Her writing focuses on the (sub)urban geographies of artistic labour and precarity, creative practice, and cultural production within differently sized cities and across city-regions. 
Ranu Basu is Professor of Geography at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC), York University, and research faculty at the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS). Her research and teaching interests relate to the geographies of marginality, diversity and social justice in cities; power, space and activism; anti-imperialism and post-colonial geographies; geopolitics of forced migration and subaltern cosmopolitanism; critical geographies of education; and spatial methodologies.
Amanda De Lisio is an Assistant Professor of physical culture, policy, and sustainable development in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science, Executive Member of CITY Institute, and Co-Director (with Dr. Tuulia Law) of the Critical Trafficking and Sex Work Studies Research Cluster at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Her research is broadly focused on health, informality, and urban development in mega-event host cities, as informed by critical feminist geographies and women (cis and trans*) in popular economies in the Global South. Her work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in England, Mitacs Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and it has been published in academic and popular presses in English and Portuguese.
Carlo Fanelli’s research focuses on the political economy of urban life, with particular attention to how austerity, public sector restructuring, and shifting patterns of work and governance shape contemporary cities. His work examines the ways municipal governments respond to economic and fiscal pressures, often resulting in policies that transform public services, labour relations, and democratic decision-making at the local level. Drawing on critical urban theory, Fanelli analyzes issues such as the privatization of public services, the rise of precarious work within city administrations, and the broader social consequences of neoliberal urban reforms. He also investigates how unions, community organizations, and social movements engage with these changes and mobilize to defend public goods and equitable urban development. Across his writing and public scholarship, Fanelli highlights the interconnectedness of urban inequality, fiscal policy, and political power, offering insights into how cities might pursue more socially just and democratically accountable futures.
Liette Gilbert is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and Graduate Program Director of Environmental Studies. Her scholarship has developed around three poles: i) migration and border politics; ii) urban planning and the political economy and ecology of sub/urbanization; and iii) politics of risk and post-disaster reconstruction (as a tragic train derailment took her research back to here home region of Lac-Mégantic). These research areas are framed by a politics of inclusion/exclusion. She is particularly interested in how the logic of exclusion reproduces itself through control, precarity, risk and crisis discourses.
Shubhra Gururani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University and the Director of the York Centre for Asian Research. Her areas of research are at the intersection critical political ecology, urbanization in the Global South, space and place, and history of science and technology. Her earlier work focused on the cultural politics of conservation and forestry in the Uttarakhand Himalayas in India. Over the last ten years, she has been conducting research on urban peripheries of metropolitan cities, namely the making of Gurgaon in India. From a political ecological perspective, she focuses on the questions of urban nature/ecologies, planning, villages in the cities, agrarian-urbanism, waste, sewage, infrastructure, and labour migration. ​
Laam Hae is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University. She studies and teaches subjects regarding urban political economy and social movements with the framework of socialist feminism and decolonial epistemologies. Laam has written about popular struggles over gentrification, city marketing, zoning regulations, the militarization of urban space, and “the right to the city,” both in North America and South Korea. Her work is concerned about developing decolonial knowledge about Korea and its relevance to the transnational social justice solidarity.
Aimi Hamraie is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability, and Associate Professor of Social Science at York University. Hamraie’s research on disability and design has helped form the fields of critical access studies and crip technoscience. They are the director of the Critical Design Lab, the author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability(University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and host of the Contra* podcast on disability and design. 
Jin Haritaworn is an associate professor of Gender, Race and Environment at York University in Toronto, Canada. They locate their work in the tradition of activist scholarship, which attempts to be in the service of communities. Their publications include two single-authored books, numerous articles (in journals such as GLQ, Society & Space, sub\urban and Topia) and several co-edited collections (including Queer Necropolitics [with Kuntsman and Posocco] and Queering Urban Justice and Marvellous Grounds [with Moussa and Ware]). Haritaworn has made contributions to several fields on both sides of the Atlantic, including gender, sexuality and transgender studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and urban studies, and has left their imprint on various concepts and debates, including gay imperialism, homonationalism, intersectionality, gentrification and criminalization, trans/queer of colour archives and politics, and queer space.
Lyndsay Hayhurst is a York Research Chair (Tier II) in Sport, Gender, Development and Digital Participatory Research, and an Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is an award-winning sociologist of sport and feminist physical culture, and her research interests include sport for development (SFD); sexual and gender-based violence prevention and sexual and reproductive health rights promotion in/through SFD; cultural studies of youth, de/anti-/postcolonial feminist theory, global governance and corporate social responsibility.
 
She has published over 60 articles and chapters on these topics, and is a co-author (with Holly Thorpe and Megan Chawansky) of Sport, Gender and Development: Intersections, Innovations and Future Trajectories (2021). Dr. Hayhurst’s research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Brandon Takayuki Hillier is an economic geographer and urban researcher. His current work examines the complementarity between the Canadian educational system and American industry, with a special interest in empirically investigating the flow of engineering graduates from the Kitchener-Waterloo region to the Bay Area and New York. Key theoretical interests include conceptualizing cross-border labour markets and inter-regional labour regimes, educational and occupational decision-making, elite formation, and work culture. He currently teaches courses on introductory urban and environmental studies, urban methods, digital and urban futures, global cities, and professional development (for co-op). He previously studied Japan’s industrial development, central banks, and smart cities. His work is supported by SSHRC and DAAD.
Korina Jocson is Associate Professor of Digital Futures in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her scholarly interests include youth literacies and cultural studies, digital media and learning ecologies, race and ethnic studies in education, critical pedagogies, and arts-based qualitative methodologies. Her thinking is informed by radical women of color feminisms and decolonial inquiry. Her earlier research on youth poetry led to youth cultural production more broadly, including expressive cultures and civic engagement through digital media, further prompting questions about what/whose literacies and knowledges count while addressing educational and social inequities across settings. Recent studies in multimedia and information technologies have propelled related questions about the futures of pedagogy, technocultures and workplace learning, and AI in education.
Roger Keil is Distinguished Research Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University in Toronto and a Fellow of CIFAR’s Humanity’s Urban Future program. Keil was the inaugural Director of the CITY Institute (2006). He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, infrastructure, and regional governance. He is the author of Pandemic Urbanism (Polity, 2023, with S. Harris Ali & Creighton Connolly) and Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018). He has recently edited two volumes on Peripheral Centralities (with Nick Phelps and Paul Maginn, 2025) and previously The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge, 2017, with Xuefei Ren), After Suburbia (UTP, 2022 with Fulong Wu) and Turning Up the Heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency (MUP, 2023, with Maria Kaika, Tait Mandler & Yannis Tzaninis, 2023).
Stefan Kipfer is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and the Director of the Cities, Regions, and Planning undergraduate program. His empirical research has focused on urban politics, urbanization and planning in transnational and comparative context. In various parts of Euro-America, including the global cities Zurich, Toronto and Paris, he has researched a range of urban social movements and their geographical imaginaries. He has investigated various forms of state intervention, from urban-regional planning, public housing and public transit to economic and environmental policy. Most recently, he has moved to research the rise of right-wing populism and neo-fascism as well as emancipatory responses to these far-right tendencies and regimes.
Abidin Kusno is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Prior to joining York in 2015, he was the Canada Research Chair in Asian Urbanism and Culture at the Institute for Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. He also held previous positions at New York University and Binghamton University, State University of New York. His academic background is in Architectural Design and Engineering (BA from Petra University, Surabaya, Indonesia) and Art History (MA and PhD from SUNY Binghamton).

His academic work draws upon a range of fields including urban studies, history, politics, cultural studies, architecture, design and geography. His research focuses on Indonesia, especially Jakarta and evolves around the issues of politics, culture and the built environment. He examines the ways in which architecture and urban space shaped politics, environments and political consciousness of different social groups at different moments in the country’s urban history. His teaching encompasses issues around politics, planning and urbanization in the context global and local power.
Ute Lehrer is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University (Toronto, Canada). She holds degrees from University of Zurich, Switzerland, and University of California, Los Angeles, has previously taught at Brock University and SUNY Buffalo, was a researcher at the Swiss Federal University of Technology in Zurich, and held visiting positions at Université de Montpellier, France, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and University of Manchester, UK.

Taking a critical and comparative approach, her research interests include urban design and land use; housing, gentrification and the condominium boom; discourse and mega-projects; as well as the social construction of public space. She has published widely in social science journals and edited books. She was the Principal Investigator and a collaborator in several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded research projects, including on Global Suburbanisms. She was just awarded a new SSHRC project on "High-rise living, public space and COVID-19 in the Greater Toronto Area".
Amin Mawani is the inaugural Director of the Master of Health Industry Administra a Professor of Taxation at York University. His research and teaching examines the impact of taxation on business and personal financial decisions. His research interest include the role of tax policy in promoting healthcare and determining the cost-benefit analysis of illness prevention programs.  
Manos Papagelis is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at York University and a faculty member of the Data Mining Lab. His research area is at the intersection of data science and machine learning, with particular interest in data mining, graph mining, big data analytics, mobility analytics, databases and knowledge discovery.
Linda Peake is Professor Emeritus (FRSC) of the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and a former director of the CITY Institute (2013-2023). She is a feminist geographer with research interests in urbanization and gendered urban insecurities, particularly as they pertain to the urban global south, and specifically Guyana. Her award-winning research integrates feminism and anti-racism into theorizations of urban everyday life, inspiring scholarship in human geography and urban studies, as well as promoting equity and diversity in the academy. Her original body of work on women as gendered urban subjects has invigorated critiques of canonical knowledge production, utilizing methodologies that engage with subaltern knowledge production and marginalized communities, and creating the field of comparative feminist urban research.
Lyndsey Rolheiser is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the Brookfield Centre in Real Estate and Infrastructure. Lyndsey received a PhD in Urban Economics from MIT, a MA in Economics from Simon Fraser University, and a BSc in Mathematics and Finance from the University of Alberta. Her research explores real estate as a spatial asset and centres questions around the people residing/working within it and regulating it. Lyndsey’s research interests include neighbourhoods and housing, commercial real estate and climate change, and transportation infrastructure and land use. Lyndsey employs a variety of methods and theoretical groundings to tackle these topics. She has published in the Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, American Journal of Public Health, Urban Studies, and Urban Geography.
Zachary Spicer is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration. He holds a PhD in Political Science from The University of Western Ontario and began his career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University after completing post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance and the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also served as a Senior Policy Advisor with the Ontario Public Service and as the Director of Research and Outreach with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He is the recipient of both the Susan Clarke Young Scholars’ Award and the Norton Long Young Scholars’ Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
Luisa Sotomayor is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Change at York University. Her research and teaching interests are focused on the various dimensions of urban inequality and their connections to governance and planning practice. I study urban violence and insecurity, housing precarity, socio-legal exclusions, and the formation of new socio-spatial peripheries and informalities. I also examine planning and urban policy responses to these issues through questions of urban politics, including the role of state and non-state actors and community activism in mobilizing, negotiating, or contesting urban planning agendas. At its core, my work questions the limits and possibilities of urban planning to redress socio-spatial injustices and promote more equitable and democratic cities. The geographic scope of my research includes both Latin America and Canada.
Laura Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and a consulting planner in the greater Toronto area. She studies the urban-rural fringe and exurbia where planning, development, and conservation priorities in Ontario’s countryside are incredibly uneven. She is a member of Ontario’s Greenbelt Council. She is an active member of the Ontario Climate Consortium, linking land-use planning and climate change action. She earned her PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and has been a registered professional planner with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute since 1996. She is a member of Lambda Alpha International, the American Planning Association, and the Canadian and American Associations of Geographers. Laura maintains an active consulting practice in Toronto.
Natasha Tusikov is an Associate Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social Science at York University. Her  research examines the intersection among law, crime, technology, and regulation. She is a senior fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada and a visiting fellow with the Justice and Technoscience Lab (JusTech Lab), School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. She is co-author (with Blayne Haggart) of The New Knowledge: Information, Data, and the Remaking of Global Power (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). She is the author of Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet (University of California Press, 2017). She is a co-editor of Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World: Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Dr. Tusikov is also co-editor of Power and Authority in Internet Governance: Return of the State? (Routledge, 2021). Her research has been published in Surveillance & Society and Internet Policy Review. Before obtaining her PhD at the Australian National University, she was a strategic criminal intelligence analyst and researcher at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa.
Patricia Wood is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and the Director of the Graduate Program of Gender, Feminist & Women's Studies. She is interested in the fields of public space, everyday territorialization, citizenship and political subjectivity, activism, urban governance, processes of inclusion and exclusion, and mobility and transportation. She is currently working on several international comparative projects on urban governance, public space, and public transportation, including several cities in India.
Alejandro Zamora is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature and Community Narratives at York University, Campus Glendon in Toronto, and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies. He is also a Full Member of the Graduate Program in Humanities and a Fellow Member of the Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean. He has also taught at other institutions such as UNAM, University of Montreal and University of Prince Edward Island. In 2013 he was a Fellow researcher at the Ibero American Institute of Berlin, Germany. He is the author of two scientific books and several articles and book chapters, and the editor of several volumes.