James Fraser

Biography

James Fraser is an urban geographer with expertise in urban development, environmental geography, and the politics of governance. His research engages issues of social justice and how that intersects particularly with housing.

At its core, James Fraser's work analyzes the ways in which state-market-society relations shape political, social and economic impacts of the production of urban space both through the optics of understanding how individuals and communities experience urbanization and urban life. In particular, his work focuses on critical conceptualizations of community and community development that draws on political-economic and post-colonial theorizations to analyze the ways in which people make participate in processes of urban restructuring throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and connecting these themes to broader issues of belonging, property, personhood, and race. In doing so he examines capital-state and state-society relations and how they inform one another.

Currently, James Fraser is examining raced and classed-based processes that constitute the production of urban space, and how people experiencing poverty encounter and shape urban (re)development. His latest and ongoing work examines conceptualizations of precarity, precarious life, politics, and the manner in which different populations assemble survival and thriving strategies.