Maurice Kwan-Chung Yip
Graduate assistant - doctoral fellow

University of Lausanne
Institute of geography and sustainability
Mouline - Géopolis 3540
CH-1015 Lausanne
 
 
 
Phone +41 21 692 3074
KwanChung.Yip@unil.ch

Maurice Yip is a Graduate Assistant in Legal Geography and a PhD Candidate at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in Switzerland. He works with Professor Jean Ruegg and his research team «IF - Informing Futures» in the Institute of Geography and Sustainability (IGD). In the IGD, he co-coordinates the urban studies research collective, which is named 'Urban Matters', with Professor Céline Rozenblat.

He conducts theoretically-driven and empirically-grounded geographical research that stands on the shoulders of giants who developed legal geography, theorised territoriality, and studied the Global East. His research has three key areas, namely:

  1. Geographical spirit: He studies the history and theory of geography as a social science discipline. Through a comparative and relational lens, he traces the establishment of geography as a field of scientific study in some selected parts of the world to explain how they have interacted, for example through the translation of geographical writings, and influenced geographical concepts, methodologies, and pedagogies;
  2. Urban transformation: He explores how urban transformation gets placed, regulated, and territorialised in the cities. His ongoing thesis work on the rise of coworking spaces in East Asian cities aims to explain how and why the rhetoric of sharing is rearranging the property relations in the city, so that he can help others understand the implications of sharing urbanism for territorial planning and urban futures; and
  3. Territorial disputes: He examines territorial disputes at various spatial scales, such as new town planning, to explain how actors adopt different tools and strategies to change the concrete material conditions and assert their claims to resources. He and his supervisor are bringing legal geography and geopolitics together for advancing knowledge of maritime law and the territoriality of islands and oceans.

Currently, he is also affiliated to the Urban Resilience Research Center at Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan, as a visiting researcher and sits on the International Steering Committee of the East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography (EARCAG). He has previously held fellowships and visiting positions at Osaka Metropolitan University (Division of Geography, Department of Human Behavioral Sciences, Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, 2023) and the University of Hong Kong (Department of Urban Planning and Design, Faculty of Architecture, 2021–2022).

https://mauriceyip.space

Curriculum vitae