Welcome to the Chair of Economic Geography

At the moment, we are doing research on the negotiation of bioeconomic futures in East Africa, the transformation of wage and reproductive labor in the context of digitalization, the political economy and ecology of global commodity chains, and the financialization of land and agriculture.

 We stand for a theoretically grounded research and teaching agenda that critically interrogates the imaginaries, trajectories, possibilities, limits and practicalities of sustainable regional development in an age of global challenges such as rising sociospatial inequality, the looming climate crisis, rising and the ongoing marketization and technologization of social, economic and ecological domains. Our work is informed by insights from heterodox economic thinking, political ecology, and post- and decolonial studies, which allow for provincializing certain conceptions of the “economy” and opening up the space of possibilities for other conceptions of “the economy”. Such a take is also sensitive to the relationality of processes of uneven development, which connects actors, phenomena and places across the globe. It attunes us to the historical becoming of economic landscapes, relationships, and practices, but at the same time seeks to transcend established territorial categories of “North” and “South” and associated disciplinary divisions of labour. In a world of increasing interconnectedness, questions of sustainable regional development cannot be addressed without a critical global relational approach that takes seriously these connections and the inequalities, value transfers, cleavages they give rise to.