Visiting Scholars - The City Institute at York University (CITY)

How to apply to be a Visiting Scholar

Application Process:

The City Institute is able to accommodate a limited number of Visiting Scholars each year. The Institute encourages applications from faculty members, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from other institutions.

Normally, we can provide visitors with a shared workspace, Internet access, and a York University library card. There is no monetary funding available for visiting scholar appointments.

Applications will be accepted at the start of each academic semester (September 1, January 1 and May 1). Visitors should apply a minimum of one semester ahead of when they plan to arrive at CITY.

DOMESTIC VISITORS:

If you are interested in applying to become a Visiting Scholar with the City Institute and are currently located in Canada please complete and send the following Visiting Scholar Form (Domestic) as well as a letter of reference and a current copy of your curriculum vitae to city@yorku.ca.

INTERNATIONAL VISITORS:

If you are interested in applying to become a Visiting Scholar with the City Institute and are currently located outside of Canada (and would be visiting as an international visiting scholar) please complete and send the following Visitin g Scholar Form (International) as well as a letter of reference and a current copy of your curriculum vitae to city@yorku.ca. In addition to these, visit of graduate students outside of Canada is through an international exchange program of their university or through York's International Visiting Research Trainee (IVRT). Send an email to city@yorku.ca if interested in applying for IVRT.

2024/2025 Visiting Scholars

**Hafsah Siddiqui** is an urban-political geographer interested in class, citizenship, and political mobilization in the Global South. She completed her doctoral research in Geography as a Gates Cambridge scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation examined the cross-class political relationships built by middle-class activists and informal settlement residents to address various forms of urban inequality and found that claims-making in the urban Global South necessitates the formation of cross-class political relationships because of the lack of access that ordinary citizens have to governance processes. Findings have been published in Area and Environment and Planning C.Her current postdoctoral work at the Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto Scarborough examines the role of class and gender in urban social movements in Pakistan. She will work on this project during her time at CITY.

**Jorge Gonçalves** holds a PhD in Geography and Territorial Management and is a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. He currently teaches courses in Human Geography, Strategic Territorial Planning, and Urban Governance. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Oviedo, where he lectures on urban planning and risk in the context of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Public Health in Disasters.
Until 2021, he coordinated the Interdisciplinary Master's in Spatial and Urban Planning, a joint program offered by three schools of the University of Lisbon.
He was a board member of CiTUA - Research Centre for innovation in Territory, Urbanism and Architecture, where he leads the Spatial Justice Lab.
He currently coordinates the Portuguese part of the European project AGE-15, focused on developing age-friendly neighborhoods through the framework of the 15-minute city model. He has published numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of urban and metropolitan governance, public participation, and strategic planning, among other topics.

Tilen (he/him) is a PhD student at the School of Geography, University of Leeds (UK). His ESRC-supported PhD project explores the production of queer spaces in small places, primarily in Slovenia and some other semi-peripheral European countries, with a focus on the role of everyday mobilities in these processes. His research critically examines spatial scale through queer mobility practices and the infrastructures that sustain them. His work engages with geographies of sexuality, mobilities, scale, encounters, host-guest dynamics, and centre-periphery relationships, with an interest in both urban and rural infrastructures. Beyond his PhD research, Tilen has contributed to the Queer Memorials research project, focusing on the Homomonument in Amsterdam, and teaches at the School of Geography in Leeds. He also serves as the Postgraduate Representative for the Space, Sexualities, and Queer Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

**Ross Beveridge** is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow with diverse teaching and research interests in the field of urban politics and governance.

An interdisciplinary urbanist, Ross studied History at the University of Manchester and International Studies at Newcastle University, before conducting EU-funded research on urban infrastructures in Europe. Ross's doctoral project focused on the politics of urban development and privatisation in 1990’s Berlin at Newcastle University. He joined Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow in 2015 from the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Germany, where he had worked for six years in various research and teaching roles. Initially at Glasgow, Ross held an Urban Studies Foundation (USF) Senior Research Fellowship before moving to his current position.

Ross's most recent book, How Cities Can Transform Democracy, was co-authored with Philippe Koch (ZHAW Zurich) and published by Polity Press in 2022.

Ross is a member of the editorial board for the journal Geography Compass and is the co-founder and editor of the Urban Political Podcast, which addresses contemporary urban issues through discussions with activists, scholars, and policy-makers from around the world.

He will be using his fellowship to collaborate with colleagues at the City Institute, including Roger Keil and Luisa Sotomayor, on the politics and governance of urban polycrisis, developing new ideas for comparative and conceptual research, engaging with the cases of Toronto, Glasgow and beyond.

**Karine Duplan** is a feminist urban geographer at the University of Geneva, dedicated to issues of social inclusion and the right to the city in globalized urban contexts, with expertise in gender, sexuality, and migration. Her work examines how discrimination and inequalities are produced, experienced, and maintained in space through both discursive and material practices—whether through public actions or everyday politics. She aims to identify opportunities for creating more liveable urban futures.

Her research has focused on the production of queer-inclusive spaces, with particular attention to the interplay between institutional and community actions. Her ongoing research investigates the everyday spatialities of queer migrants, using urban creative participatory methodologies to highlight the contributions of queer exiles’ expertise to urban hospitality. This research also seeks to pave the way for a decolonial reflection on the inclusive city. By focusing on the intersectional politics of urban in/justice, her work contributes to the development of comparative perspectives on social inclusion.

Karine is an elected board member of the International Geographical Union’s Commission for Gender and Geography and a member of the Gender and Sexuality in Migration research Standing Committee (GenSeM) at IMISCOE – International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion. She is a co-founder of the Swiss Feminist Geographies network and has been nominated by the Swiss National Foundation as an Outstanding Female Academic. Karine is also collaborating with public policies, through public talks and as an expert at provincial and municipal level with the aim of improving social inclusion and gender equality.

Dr. Anke Schwarz is a political and urban geographer who currently holds the position of interim associate professor of Human Geography at Heidelberg University. Anke obtained a PhD in Human Geography from University of Hamburg, has been a visiting researcher at UNAM in Mexico City and UNINA in Naples, and recently completed her habilitation (venia legendi) at TU Dresden, again in Human Geography. Her post-doctoral work has mainly focused on theories of territorialization, socio-territorial movements, and geographies of Speculative and Science Fiction. Anke is a founding member of the Terra-R research network, where she is co-editing the collectively written volume ‘Das Ende rechter Räume. Zu Territorialisierungen der radikalen Rechten’, forthcoming in 2025. Her paper ‘Territorial subjectivities. The missing link between political subjectivity and territorialization’, co-authored with Monika Streule, has recently been published in Progress in Human Geography.

**Sébastien Lambelet** is a post-doctoral fellow with a background in political science and urban studies. He defended his PhD in 2019 at the University of Geneva. His current research interests range from urban governance modes and public-private power relations to land policy and net land neutrality. He recently obtained a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a two-year research project investigating spatial planning and housing policies within the four cities of Toronto, Zurich (global cities), Geneva and Ottawa-Gatineau (transboundary cities). At the City Institute, you can find Sébastien in Room 745 on the 7th floor of Kaneff. He is currently working under the supervision of Professor Roger Keil.

**Alexandre Donnen** is completing a PhD in Sociology at the Université libre de Bruxelles funded by the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) of Belgium. Situated at the crossroads of urban and gender sociology fields, Alexandre’s research focuses on the relationship between urban transformation and LGBTQ visibilization in Brussels’s central and pericentral districts. Between January and October 2020, Alexandre conducted research at the UCLouvain and for the government of Brussels, on the access to and the use of primary care by so-called "vulnerable" residents of the city. Currently, and until the end of June 2024, Alexandre is on a research visit to York University's City Institute under the supervision of Professor Alison L. Bain

Rachel is an urban and economic geographer who recently completed her PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests center on the role of professionals, technocratic institutions, and the ceaseless, banal production of common-sense knowledge in shaping the “urban” on a global scale, particularly from a critical political-economic perspective and through multi-sited ethnographic methods. At CITY she will explore the phenomenon of urban solutionism: a phase-shift transformation in 21st-century global urban governance that captures the ways whereby a range of networked, cross-border elite actors—municipal governments, think tanks, international financial institutions, philanthropic foundations, private sector corporations—are co-producing “solutions” en masse for cities and reshaping the parameters (and possibilities) of problem-solving in urban policymaking. Paramount to this research are questions surrounding the global and democratic dimensions of problem-solving where cities are concerned. It complements directly dimensions of critical and collaborative research at CITY, and the research agendas of faculty members including Luisa Sotomayor on housing solutionism and Roger Keil on urban futures.

In December 2023, **Chan Arun Pina** completed their PhD in Urban Geography at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Their dissertation, *Trans imaging* of non-normative homes, offers a spatial-visual analysis of the housing experiences of LGBTQ+ postsecondary students in two Indian megacities. In doing so, the research also presents a queer and trans ecological critique of cisheteronormative planning of higher education campuses and student housing in Mumbai and New Delhi. Currently, Chan is working with professors Luisa Sotomayor and Alison Bain at the City Institute on the project “Undoing Town and Gown: Urban university campuses in Delhi and Toronto.” This transnational project aims to cross-examine how campus planning and governance, neighbourhood politics and socio-spatial conflicts are manifested at the campus edge as it tensely interfaces with the city.

To see our past visiting scholars please click here