Dr Mark Jackson

I am a human geographer with research and teaching interests in how modern colonialism has shaped, and continues to shape, our planetary present.

As such, I'm very interested in ways we can approach thinking and acting in the world differently than those inherited from the often violent, destructive, and reductive structures of modernity set in complex motion more than 500 years ago, but whose intellectual lineages go much further back.

Studying modern colonialism and its contemporary form, coloniality, entails studying cultural, economic, political, and ecological geographies. All of these facets, and more, come together to shape how colonialism and coloniality work, so it means reading and thinking across a complex range of intersecting domains of analysis.

My work lies, therefore, in the following more specific areas of study:

• coloniality, decolonial, and postcolonial geographies of modernity
• political ecology, nature-cultures, environmentality
• technology, materiality, and posthumanisms
• contemporary and classical social theory and modern philosophy
• postcolonial urbanisms
• critical political economy
• decolonising university curricula and pedagogies

I am currently an editor of the journal cultural geographies and a series editor with the Routledge Research series on decoloniality and new postcolonialisms.

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.

Past Research

Past research has examined care and critique in Indigenous legal appraoches to the politics of reconciliation in Canada, the politics of the Anthropocene and global environmental governance, possibilities and limits in bridging the conceptual landscapes of posthumanism and postcolonialism, 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.

Research Supervision

I currently supervise 3 postgraduate reseach students (PhDs):

• Courtenay Crawford: decoloniality and eco-Dharma
• Arpeeta Mizan: postcolonial legal consciousness in urban Bangladesh
• Austin Read: political ontology of Atlantic salmon and postcolonial toxicity

Recent PhD students have studied things like: geophilosophy (Theo Parker), the politics of the more-than-human microbiome (Alice Beck), postcolonial togetherness and urban coping in Cape Town, South Africa (Cara Mazetti), the affect of modern aspiration and urban materiality in capitalist China (Sam Berlin), the apocalyptic imaginary and environmental gentrification (Earl Harper), peace geographies (Harry Bregazzi), an institutional ethnography of water in northern Chile (Adriana Suarez-Delucchi), peace and the feminist politics of breath in Northern Ireland (Ciara Merrick), and postsecularism and urban Muslim imaginaries (Giuseppe Carta). Previous PhD students have studied new materialisms and technologies of the self, wool and the politics of embodiment, postcards, pervasive computing, gentrification, and local economies.

PhD students' geographical range is global with analyses in places like the UK and Northern Ireland, Cape Town, Chile, the EU, China, Italy, the US. 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 16 PhD students to completion.

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