Tomas Frederiksen

Overview

Firstly, if you want a jargon-free description of my current research, I''d recommend looking at my blog as this description is unapologetically academic. 

Broadly, my research is interested in questions of extraction and development. I locate my approach in the marchlands between development studies and environmental and political geography. I am interested in bringing together theoretical and policy questions of environmental change, international development and socio-environmental justice in the global South through historically-rich and multi-scalar analyses of the political ecologies of environmental governance and natural resource extraction. My research examines historical and contemporary natural resource extraction and international development along three axes: (i) transnational environmental governance and international development, (ii) The political ecology of natural resource extraction in Africa and Latin America and (iii) the historical and contemporary geographies of colonialism in Africa. 

The current focus of my research is the processes, policies and institutions through which environmental change in the global South is constituted and its consequences for international development. In particular, how the practices of mining companies in Zambia, Ghana and Peru are shaped through international, national and local regulatory pressures producing specific socio-environmental outcomes. Here, I am seeking to understand the political and economic origins of environmental and social change with a focus on the political struggles and institutions surrounding changing forms of access to and control over resources and the politics of knowledge production.

Biography

Commonwealth Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Toronto, September 2010 - September 2011

PhD Human Geography. School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester. Thesis entitled ‘Unearthing Rule - mining, power and the political ecology of extraction in colonial Zambia’. 2010

MA International Development: Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction. Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester. 2006

BA (Hons) Geography with Development Studies. University of Sussex. 2000