Research expertise: political sociology, urban studies, transdisciplinary research, decoloniality

Sylvia Croese, UCI assistant professor of global and international studies, studies questions of urban power, politics and development, and decolonial knowledge production, particularly in contexts marked by deep social, spatial, economic or epistemic inequalities. She’s specifically interested in the ways in which context specific forces shape the workings of global knowledge policy and investment flows in Lusophone Africa (Portuguese-speaking African countries). Her work uses transdisciplinary approaches through long standing collaborations with city officials, urban practitioners, academics and community leaders, and is highly interdisciplinary, cutting across fields of geography, anthropology, political science, development and urban studies. Her research has been published in journals including the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Urban Geography and African Affairs, and she has edited several volumes focused on urban knowledge production and the Sustainable Development Goals.

 

 

Croese earned her bachelor’s and master’s in international relations at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in The Netherlands and her Ph.D. in sociology from the African Doctoral Academy at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. She comes to UCI following her post as a senior researcher in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University in Johannesburg and as a researcher with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. She’s excited to bring a critical African voice to her new role at UCI in global and international studies, and she’s looking forward to continuing producing knowledge that challenges existing global and urban research through collaborative and comparative learning, thinking, researching and teaching.