Below are sections of my reading list that I compiled for my preliminary/qualifying exams in Human Geography at University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am indebted to many professors and colleagues in graduate seminars and conferences who directed me to these excellent sources. This is not meant to be an exhaustive or definitive list. I have selected sources that I wanted to read and those that closely resonated with my own research interests. I hope it is useful for other students and scholars of Human Geography and allied disciplines. Many thanks to Prof. Matt Turner for his comments and guidance.

---

URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY

STS & Non/Post/Other-than/More-than Humans 

• Bruno, L. (1999 [1983]), “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In M. Biagioli, (ed.) The Science Studies Reader. New York, Routledge: 258-275.

• Callon, M. 1986. “Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay.” In J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 196-223). London and New York: Routledge.

• Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies,14(3), 575-599. doi:10.2307/3178066

• Haraway, D. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:  Routledge.

• Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

• Barad, K. (1998), “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10(2):88-128.

• Barad, K. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society28:3, 801-831

• Mol, A. (1999), “Ontological Politics.”  In John Law and John Hassard (eds.) Actor Network Theory and After, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

• Law, J. (1999), “After Ant: Complexity, Naming and Topology” In John Law and John Hassard (eds.) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

• Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press: Durham.

• Hecht, G. 2018. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca33.1.05

• Haraway, D. 2016. “Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 99-103.

Political Ecology & Non/Post/Other-than/More-than Humans

• Robbins, Paul. 2012. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Second Edition. London: Blackwell.

• Goldman, M.J., Nadasry, P. & Turner, M.D. 2011. Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011

• Mitchell, T. (2002). Can the Mosquito Speak? In Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (pp. 19-53). University of California Press.

• Castree, N. 2002. “False Antitheses? Marxism, Nature and Actor-Networks.” Antipode 34 (1): 111–146.

• Kirsch, S. & Mitchell, D. (2004) The Nature of Things: Dead Labor, Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism. Antipode, 36, 687-705.

• Bakker, K., & Bridge, G. (2006). Material worlds? Resource geographies and the `matter of nature’. Progress in Human Geography, 30(1), 5–27

• Sundberg, J. (2011). Diabolic Caminos in the Desert and Cat Fights on the R´ıo: A Posthumanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States–Mexico Borderlands. Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

• Castree, N. 2015. “Capitalism and the Marxist critique of political ecology.” In T. Perreault, G. Bridge & J. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (pp. 279-292). London: Routledge.

Key Debates in Urban Political Ecology

• W. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis. W. W. Norton & Company.

• Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishers.

 

• Neil Smith. 1984. “The Production of Nature,” in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 49–91.

• Heynen, N., Kaika, M. & Swyngedouw, E. 2006. In the Nature of Cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London & New York: Routledge.

• Loftus, A. 2012. Everyday Environmentalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

• Swyngedouw, E. 1996. The city as a hybrid: On nature, society and cyborg urbanization. Capitalism Nature Socialism 7:65-80.

• Swyngedouw, E. and N. Heynen. 2003. Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale. Antipode 35:898-918.

• Gandy, M. 2004. “Rethinking urban metabolism: Water, space and the modern city”, City 8 (3): 363-369.

• Keil, R. (2005). “Progress Report: Urban Political Ecology.” Urban Geography 26(7): 640-651.

• Matthew Gandy. 2005. Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.

• Braun B. (2005) Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography. Progress in Human Geography 29: 635-650

• Swyngedouw E (2006) Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities. Science as Culture15:105–121

• Robbins, P. 2007. Lawn People: How Grass, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

• Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

• Zimmer, A. (2010). URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY: Theoretical concepts, challenges, and suggested future directions. Erdkunde,64(4), 343-354. Retrieved April 20, 2020, from jstor.org/stable/25822107

• Gabriel, N. (2014), Urban Political Ecology: Environmental Imaginary, Governance, and the Non‐Human. Geography Compass, 8: 38-48. doi:1111/gec3.12110

• Heynen, Nik. 2014. “Urban political ecology I: The urban century” Progress in Human Geography 38: 598-604.

• Rademacher, Anne. 2015. “Urban Political Ecology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 137–152.

• Heynen, N. (2018). Urban political ecology III: The feminist and queer century. Progress in Human Geography, 42(3), 446–452. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517693336

• Angelo, H. and Wachsmuth D. (2014) “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism”. International Journal of Urban & Regional Planning.

• Connolly, C. (2019), Urban Political Ecology Beyond Methodological Cityism. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res., 43: 63-75. doi:1111/1468-2427.12710

• Lawhon, Mary, Henrik Ernston and Jonathan Silver. 2014. “Provincializing urban political ecology: Towards a situated UPE through African urbanism.” Antipode 46(2): 497-516.

• Doshi S (2017) Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions. Area 49(1): 125–128

• Truelove, Y. (2019). Rethinking water insecurity, inequality and infrastructure through an embodied urban political ecology.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water6, no. 3: e1342.

• Tzaninis, Y., Mandler, T., Kaika, M., & Keil, R. (2020). Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature.’ Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520903350

• Loftus, A. (2019). Political ecology III: Who are ‘the people’? Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519884632

  Case Studies in Urban Political Ecology

• Myers, G. (1999). Political ecology and urbanisation: Zanzibar’s construction materials industry. The Journal of Modern African Studies,37(1), 83-108. doi:10.1017/S0022278X99002980

• Mawdsley, Emma. 2004. “India’s Middle Classes and the Environment.” Development and Change35 (1): 79–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2004.00343.x.

• Bakker, K. 2005. Neoliberalizing Nature? Market Environmentalism in Water Supply in England and Wales. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95:542 – 565.

• René Véron. 2006. “Remaking urban environments: the political ecology of air pollution in Delhi.” Environment and Planning A 38(11): 2093-2109.

• Perkins HA. (2007) Ecologies of actor-networks and (non)social labor within the urban political economies of nature. Geoforum 38: 1152-1162.

• Holifield, R. (2009), Actor‐Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology. Antipode, 41: 637-658. doi:1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00692.x

• Grove K (2009) Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the nonhuman. Geoforum 40(2): 207–216.

• Harvey, P. (2010). Cementing Relations: The Materiality of Roads and Public Spaces in Provincial Peru. Social Analysis, 54(2). https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2010.540203

• Truelove, Y. 2011. “(Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework”. Geoforum 32: 143-152.

• Anand, Nikhil. 2011. “Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai.” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4: 542–564.

• Rademacher, A. 2011. Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu. Duke University Press.

• Gidwani, V. and Reddy, R.N. (2011), The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus. Antipode, 43: 1625-1658. doi:1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00902.x

• Carse, A. (2012). Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed. Social Studies of Science, 42(4), 539–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712440166

• Bakker K. 2013. “Constructing ‘public’ water: The World Bank, urban water supply and the biopolitics of development. Society and Space 31(2): 280-300.

• Meehan, Katie M. 2014. “Tool-Power: Water Infrastructure as Wellsprings of State Power.” Geoforum 57 (Supplement C): 215–24.

• Gupta, Akhil. 2015. “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South.” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 4: 555-568.

• Ranganathan, M.(2015) Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore. Antipode, 47: 1300– 1320. doi: 1111/anti.12149.

• Desai, R., McFarlane, C.and Graham, S. (2015) The Politics of Open Defecation: Informality, Body, and Infrastructure in Mumbai, Antipode, 36, pages 98– 120. doi: 1111/anti.12117.

• Demaria, F., and Schindler, S. (2016) Contesting Urban Metabolism: Struggles Over Waste‐to‐Energy in Delhi, India. Antipode, 48: 293– 313. doi: 1111/anti.12191.

• Cornea, Natasha, Anna Zimmer, and René Véron. 2016. “Ponds, Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research40 (2): 395–409.

• Yaffa Truelove(2019) Gray Zones: The Everyday Practices and Governance of Water beyond the Network, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109:6, 1758-1774, DOI: 1080/24694452.2019.1581598

• Hetherington, K (Ed.). 2019. Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.