Principal Investigator
Linda Peake is the Principal Investigator of Urbanization, Gender, and the global south: a transformative knowledge network (GenUrb) and Director of the City Institute at York University, Toronto, Canada, where she is also a member of the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. She is a feminist geographer who has engaged in urban theory production and conducted empirically-informed research on women in cities in both North America and the Anglo-speaking Caribbean, and in particular in Guyana, addressing issues confronting women in relation to economic policies, poverty, violence, and subject formation. Her interests in knowledge production also extend to issues of engaging with people experiencing mental and emotional distress and she is currently Co-Chair of the AAG Affinity Group on Mental Health.
She has numerous publications and has sat on a number of editorial boards of academic journals. Among others she sits on the editorial board of Urban Geography, the International Advisory Board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the Urban Studies Foundation Board. Her latest publications include the books Urbanization in a Global Context. 2nd edition (edited with A. Bain, forthcoming) and Peake, L., Koleth, E., Tanyildiz, G., S. Narayanareddy, R. N., and patrick, d. (eds) (forthcoming) A Feminist Urban Theory for our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban (London: Antipode Book Series, Wiley). Her influence on urban scholarship is also evident in her supervision and mentoring of a new generation of scholars--MAs, Ph.D.s, post-doctoral fellows and early career academics. She has increasingly taken on administrative and leadership roles in the university, at the national level in Canada and globally. She currently sits on the board of the Urban Studies Foundation, and she has personally secured over CAD$4M in research monies.Grant Manager
Leeann Bennett is the Grant Manager of the SSHRC Partnership Grant, “Urbanization, Gender, and the Global South: A transformative knowledge network”, with Professor Linda Peake, at the City Institute. She took on this role in November 2017. Leeann has been the coordinator of the CITY Institute since April 2017 but has worked at CITY in various roles since 2013.
Leeann has a Master's degree in Women's Studies from York University. Her research interests include sexuality studies, particularly sex work and LGBTQ activism, Caribbean studies, transnational feminism, feminist methods and methodologies, and popular culture. To contact Leeann, please email her at leeann3[at]yorku[dot]ca or genurb[at]yorku[dot]ca.
Post-Doctoral Visitors & Research Associates
In 2021, Elsa Koleth was GenUrb’s Feminist Urban Comparative Research Associate, assisting with comparative aspects of the project. From 2017-2020, Elsa was a Post-Doctoral Visitor with GenUrb. Elsa completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney in the field of migration studies with a thesis entitled “Haunted Borders: Temporary migration and the recalibration of racialized belonging in Australia.”
During her doctoral study Elsa was a researcher in an international study funded by the Australian Research Council on Social Transformation and International Migration in the Twenty-First Century (STIM). She has previously worked in legal policy and parliamentary research roles in Australia. Elsa’s research interests include the spatialities and temporalities of processes of urbanization, migration, and mobility, transnationalism and border-making, and the shifting nature of governmentalities and subjectivities, particularly in relation to the intersections of race, gender, and class.
Nasya Razavi is a Post-Doctoral Visitor with GenUrb, leading the Cochabamba City Research Team. Nasya completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Geography & Planning at Queen's University. Her dissertation, "Social Control and Public Water," examines participatory practices in water governance, focusing on the remunicipalisation of water services in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Nasya is also affiliated with the Municipal Services Project, an international research programme on policy alternatives in municipal service delivery. Nasya has previously worked for the Government of Canada and recently as coordinator of the Next Generation program, a joint initiative between the Canadian Council for International Co-operation and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development.
Araby Smyth is a Post-Doctoral Visitor with GenUrb, starting in November 2021. She is a feminist economic geographer and her work bridges interdisciplinary debates across critical development and finance studies, post and de-colonial studies, Latin American feminist and Indigenous studies, and critical university studies. She completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation used remittances as a lens for investigating struggles over how productive and reproductive labor are valued, and the ways that international institutions, national governments and financial actors assess migrants and their families as sources of capital accumulation. Prior to her Ph.D., Araby attended Hunter College of the City University of New York and was the communications intern at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. She has also contributed to the research projects A Queer New York (Jack Gieseking) and Mapping the Solidarity Economy (Marianna Pavlovskaya). Her writing has appeared in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space; Gender, Place & Culture; Geoforum; and The Conversation.
Publications Manager & Editor
dp was GenUrb’s Publications Manager and Editor in 2020-2021. They hold a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from York University and have previously taught at the Women's Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Their research and activism bridge transfeminist and queer autonomy, queer urban ecologies, non-binary life/living, transversal politics, and the everyday place-making practices. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Avery Review, and in numerous edited collections and journals, including Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and Social and Cultural Geography. Over the last several years, they have been a part of an intergenerational collective of geographers (Linda Peake, Raj Reddy, Elsa Koleth, and Gökbörü Tanyildiz) whose forthcoming edited volume A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban is due to be published in 2021 as part of Wiley-Blackwell's Antipode Book Series.
Research and Graduate Assistants
2021-2022
2020-2021
2019-2020
