Dr Alicia Hayashi Lazzarini

About me:

I am a human and economic geographer whose research explores contemporary and colonial investment in Africa. My interdisciplinary research engages geographical and feminist political economy, postcolonial African studies, urban studies, and critical development, race, and labor studies. I am particularly interested in capitalist dynamics in Portuguese-speaking Africa and the production of place.

Before joining Geography at the University of Exeter I was a Fellow of Human Geography at the London School of Economics, a Postdoctoral Fellow of Geography at Bucknell University, and a Fulbright Fellow to Mozambique.

Broad research specialisms

• Investment, resource extraction, and uneven development
• Colonial and postcolonial Africa
• Rural-urban transformation
• Africa-China relations
• Critical agrarian studies
• Postcolonial studies and race, class, and gender

Interests:

Broadly, my research explores postcolonial investment and resource extraction, spatial productions of race, and Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) African studies. In particular, I investigate contemporary and historical, investment related economic displacement and transformation in Africa. Through this scholarship, I explore how ‘globalized’ capitalist investments shape specific places and environments, and how such dynamics produce sociocultural inequality. Engaging critical ethnographic and archival methods with geographical political economy and postcolonial conceptual frames, I investigate the colonial-racial legacies, and spatial political economies, that shape and limit social and economic possibility today.

My current research agenda explores investment-related sociospatial transformation through my current book project, titled Anxious Capital: Reinvestment and the Production of Postcolonial Place, which explores agroindustrial and rural-urban investment in southern Mozambique. It also includes two interrelated, emergent research themes, on spatial productions of race, and urban change particularly vis-à-vis East Asian investment.

Qualifications:

PhD in Geography, University of Minnesota
MA in Geography, University of Minnesota
BA in Feminist Studies, University of Washington
BA in English Literature, University of Washington