Laura Neville

About

Laura is a senior researcher in the research team M3, working on the SNSF project Cultural Flagships: Pathways, Practices and Politics of a Global Urban Type.

She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Lausanne. Before joining IGD, she completed an MSc in Urbanisation and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MA in Anthropology and Sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and a BSc in Geography at the University of Lausanne. In 2012-13, she spent the final year of her Bachelor's degree at the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago. She was a visiting PhD student at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia, and at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, UK, on an SNSF Doc.Mobility fellowship.

Research interests

Her research sits at the intersection of feminist, social and urban geographies, focusing on the embodied processes and everyday politics of urban environmental change, new forms of inhabitation and global urbanism in urban Latin America (Colombia, Chile). She investigates the embodied processes produced by and through the material transformation of urban spaces and infrastructures against the dynamics of dispossession in the urbanising world.

Her doctoral research focused on lived experiences and mundane negotiations of living with waste and embodied experiences of toxicities shaped by historical inequalities, structures of power and hierarchies of gender, race, and class in Cartagena, Colombia. She is currently turning her dissertation into a manuscript that will examine how everyday bodily experiences with waste and infrastructures of disposability become constitutive of contentious relational politics of placemaking and differing forms of urban belonging as residents in urban contexts contend with ever-evolving waste challenges. Through ethnographic research, it weaves together the multivocal and multi-level stories and everyday embodied experiences of socially differentiated urban residents - women, men, poor, lower middle-income, wealthy, Afro-Colombian, internally displaced, waste pickers, domestic workers - with and through waste to make subtle claims on the city. It combines feminist urban political ecology, Black Geographies, and decolonial Latin American theory to show the centrality of intersectional waste politics to understanding the inherent plurality of relational politics of place-making in the context of the unfolding climate crisis.

Within the M3 research team at IGD, she has started a new project on cultural flagships in Santiago de Chile. She explores how global iconic buildings such as cultural flagships are experienced and transformed in the everyday, and shaped through bodily politics against past and present forms of urban violence. She engages with feminist participatory collaborative visual research methods to analyse the intimate roles and functions of cultural flagships that inform our understandings of a global urban type as everyday spaces of political life from which to rethink people's embodied spatialities, subjectivities, and struggles.

Together with Silke Oldenburg, she was awarded an Agora grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2022-23 (University of Basel). The collaborative communication project with urban youth was entitled "Urban Waterworlds: Dialogues on Urban Flooding, Climate Justice and the Future of Water in the City". The project worked beyond the spaces of academia, drawing on the diverse knowledge of a team of academics, grassroots environmental organisations, social workers, teachers, and photographers, and involved workshops, urban environmental collective walks, and artistic work, with youth in Lausanne and Basel, Switzerland, and Cartagena, Colombia.

Prior to joining IGD, she investigated the lived dwelling realities of migrant populations, focusing on access to self-built housing as well as the everyday implications of housing policies in two Chilean cities.