I spent my childhood and teenage years split between the cities of Flint, Michigan and El Paso, Texas. Through my time in both areas, I became acutely aware of the discourses surrounding inequality, urban crime, racism, immigration, and structural disadvantage. The landscape of each city – one a declining post-industrial flatland, the other a mountainous desert metropolis – sparked my interest in how urban spaces can interact with their inhabitants.
I moved to the UK for studies when I was 18, fascinated by the idea of life in foreign state. I wanted to push myself and see what a different part of the world could teach me about politics, culture, and urban life. I took a unique path to the planning discipline, initially studying Philosophy & Literature before switching to Anthropology & Geography during my undergraduate years. An exchange year in Tallinn, Estonia opened up further learning opportunities, and it was there that I truly became engaged with Anthropology as a discipline. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the border city of Narva, where I analysed the relationship between cross-border smugglers, grey-market sellers, and the Estonian state.
My interest in planning and policy research began as a result of these diverse experiences. I recently finished an Erasmus Mundus MSc program in Spatial Planning, which allowed me to study the ‘top-down’ perspective of how European regions are organised. In addition to exploring the effects of policies on communities, I was able to better understand how and why particular policies were created. This is something I have been able to take further at Nordregio, where the ‘Nordic angle’ has been a unique and inspiring take on urban development.
I am attracted to dense, contentious topics and desire to explore political movements, human rights, and social inequity in an urban, European context. For me, the city is at the centre of these issues, and urban landscapes have become focal points of conflict within a contested and rapidly changing European Union. More than ever, there is a need to be flexible, reflexive, and cross-disciplinary in approaching urban spaces.