Dr Mark Jackson

Welcome to my research profile.

I am a human geographer with a research focus in the following areas:

• coloniality, decolonial, and postcolonial geographies
• political ecology, nature-cultures, environmentality
• technology, materiality, and posthumanisms
• contemporary and classical social theory and philosophy
• postcolonial urbanisms
• critical political economy

Current Research

The aim of my current research is to rethink the political and ethical meaning of critique within relational ecologies and under the terms of decoloniality. More broadly, my research focuses on how the postcolonial imagination and decolonising intellectual and practical projects are influenced by, and influence, posthumanisms.

In 2018, I published an edited volume on the relationships between coloniality, political ontology, and posthumanisms. Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman (Routledge, 2018) includes an introduction and first chapter by me, and a lovely series of reflections by a diverse range of scholars in disciplines like: human geography, politics, and literary studies. I am also currently the series editor for a new Routledge Research Series called 'New Postcolonialisms'.

Past Research

Past research has examined the materialities of artificial islands, consumption and built space, postcolonial city spaces, commodities and urban consumer landscapes, city ruins, and historiographic ethics. Published work also includes visual research and photographic exhibitions.

Background

In the summer of 2007, I joined the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences after having completed my PhD at the University of Alberta, in Canada, under the supervision of the noted Marxian sociologist and cultural historian, Prof. Derek Sayer. My PhD research focused on the postcolonial modernity of Calcutta. After a long stint of ethnographic, textual, archival, and visual research in Calcutta, I mobilised a reading of the city-text through the lens of German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, Bengali literary modernism, folk painting, and transitioning architectures of consumption and dwelling in the city.

My background is primarily theoretical, as my undergraduate honours and masters degrees were in philosophy, with an emphasis, in the latter, on Foucault’s aesthetics and the ethics of critique. Qualitative interests in visual methods, ethnography, and historiography were fuelled in the PhD, and continue to make themselves felt today. Comprehensive specialisms also included work in science and technology studies, political ecology, and environmental ethics. I taught for a few years at the University of Alberta as a Sessional Instructor while completing my PhD. Courses I taught included urban studies, community studies, gender theory, social and critical theory, introductory political economy, and introductory sociology.

Research Supervision

I currently co/supervise 6 postgraduate reseach students in a range of disciplinary areas including: decoloniality and eco-Dharma (Crawford), the political ontology of salmon (Austin), phrenology, nature and the contemporary event (Parker), the microbiome and FMT (Beck), postcolonial urban togetherness and COVID-19 in Cape Town (Mazetti-Claassen), and the affect of urban aspiration in China (Berlin). Recent PhD students have studied things like the apocalypse and environmental gentrification (Harper), peace geographies (Bregazzi), institutional ethnography of water in Chile (Suarez-Delucchi), peace and the politics of breath in Northern Ireland (Merrick), and postsecularism and urban Muslim imaginaries (Carta). Students' geographical range is global with analyses in places like Northern Ireland, Cape Town, Chile, the EU, China, Italy, the US, etc. Similarly, the theoretical range and methodologies employed in their projects is also diverse, with research emerging from attention to new materialisms, affect, feminist embodiment, Institutional Ethnography (IE), semiotics, post- and de-coloniality, post-politics, and critical geo-politics. To date, I have successfully supervised 12 PhD students to completion.

While I welcome requests for PhD supervision, I have little capacity to take on many new PhD students; I get many requests. I'm only able to supervise PhD students who meet at least one (ideally more than one) of the following criteria:

• decolonial, postcolonial, feminist, and/or posthumanist theoretical orientations and contexts
• critical political ecologies, political ontology, and environmental humanities oriented geographies, particularly related to decolonial and postcolonial geographies and posthumanisms
• urban postcolonialities 

Memberships

Association of American Geographers (AAG)

Royal Geographical Society Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG)

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy