Dr Ioanna Korfiati
Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2022 - July 2023
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
I am a human geographer working at the intersection of economic and political geography, urbanism and spatial planning, sociology, and critical theory, with a focus on the political economy of land and landscapes, geographies of dispossession, crisis, and uneven development, and informal relations in land and property. I trained as an architect and urbanist at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and as a human geographer at the University of Edinburgh, where I was awarded a PhD in 2020 and a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in 2021. Looking at the political economy of land dispossession and geographies of crisis in Greece, my doctoral research sought to dissect the specific mechanisms of land dispossession employed by the combined efforts of local networks of power, investors and the state; reaffirm the crucial re-regulating role of the latter in theories of dispossession; and problematise the dialectic relationship of continuity and discontinuity between crisis and inherited, path-dependent landscapes of uneven geographical development. I have published in Antipode and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and I am currently working towards further disseminating my work to academic and broader audiences.
Project title: Towards a Critical Sociology of Land Dispossession: Socio-Spatial Conflicts and the State on Crete’s Contested Edge
The project seeks to develop a novel theoretical frame for a critical sociology of land dispossession: the spatial interplay between people, land and power. Informed by a qualitative, critical political economy perspective, it seeks to address two key pillars of the social production of land dispossession: i. the hegemonic practices of the capitalist state and the mobilisation of its bureaucratic and normalising powers; and ii. the mediating role of local networks of power in the socio-spatial conflicts produced at the ground-level.