Austin Zeiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the social and political dimensions of urbanization and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a focus on Colombia. Austin holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University as well as a Master of Environmental Science degree from Yale University and a BA in Economics from Colgate University.
Austin’s scholarship is engaged with current debates across geography, anthropology, sociology, politics, and history. He is also active in the regional and thematic fields of Latin American and Caribbean studies, urban studies, environmental studies, science and technology studies, security studies, and Black studies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia over nearly two decades, he seeks to advance debates from these diverse scholarly traditions while pushing them to engage with the major social and environmental challenges of the present.
Austin has recently completed his second monograph, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River (Duke 2025), which uncovers the historical and contemporary role of the waterway in the expansion of colonial and racial capitalism in the Americas. In so doing, Artery expands the understanding of present and future environmental crises by showing how unsustainable relations between humans and the planet are underpinned by unequal relations in human society. The account foregrounds the plan to create a logistics corridor along the river through a series of hydromodification works. Examining this infrastructure megaproject reveals the centrality of racialization to contemporary ecological predicaments as well as the conditions of possibility for change.
Austin’s first book, Endangered City: The Politics of Risk and Security in Bogotá (Duke 2016), examines the political imperative to protect life against future threats by focusing an ethnographic lens on the governance of environmental hazards (landslides, floods, and earthquakes) in the self-built settlements of the urban periphery. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, Endangered City argues that logics of security and risk increasingly define political life, especially for those at the urban margins. The book theorizes the global condition of “endangerment”—that is, forms of collectivity and entitlement predicated on degrees of vulnerability and victimhood.
Austin’s research has appeared in a range of scholarly and public outlets, such as Antipode, Public Culture, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, American Ethnologist, openDemocracy, and the Guardian. He has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. From 2012 to 2014, Austin coordinated the Urban Uncertainty project at LSE Cities, where he remains a Research Associate. Raised in Philadelphia, he has previously worked on urban and environmental issues in Baltimore and San Francisco.
Get to know Austin a little more through our Spotlight series or by listening to him speaking about his experience aboard a commercial riverboat on the Magdalena River in this University of Toronto podcast.