Christian Anderson

Associate Professor

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

University of Washington Bothell

Seattle, Washington State, US

Other Affiliations

Affiliate Faculty in Geography, University of Washington Seattle

Degrees

B.A. Individualized Interdepartmental Studies, University of Minnesota

M.A. Culture, Globalization and the City, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Ph.D. Geography, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

Research Interests

I am an urban thinker and geographer whose work focuses on intersections among people, places, and urban political economy; social reproduction, everyday life and everyday practice; and formations of popular common sense, narrative, and culture. I’ve long been interested in using ethnography to understand how these matters intersect in relation to issues of gentrification, social spatial inequality, and place-based formations of power (my 2020 book in the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series, Urbanism without Guarantees, encapsulates much of my thinking along these lines). Increasingly, I am also engaging confluences with ecology, design, technology, and participatory process and working (slowly!) on (probably too many!) different projects which pursue possibilities for place-based praxis in collaborative, participatory, publicly engaged, and action-oriented modes.

Links

Personal-professional site

Faculty-institutional profile

Contact Information

Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246. cmander@uw.edu

Publications

Urbanism without Guarantees: The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood

Focusing very tightly on just four blocks of a single street in Manhattan (New York City), the book shows how formations of gentrification and policing are connected to forms of common sense and everyday practice which, I argue, are informed by people’s ordinary sensibilities as situated/embedded in urban space and place. I show how consequential connections between everyday experience, sense making, routine practice, and spatial labor are mediated by what I think of as “performative infrastructures,” all coming together in contingent ways which can buoy deeply inequitable processes but might also—if subjected to deliberative critical praxis, concerted organizing, and so forth—be transformed toward different socialities and outcomes.

This is the fifth book in the Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Series (published by University of Minnesota Press), and has featured in Community Economies News.