Erica is an economic geographer. She graduated with a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London in 2016. She joined the Department in September 2019 having previously worked at the LSE, Queen Mary University of London, and Newcastle University.

Erica’s research takes a heterodox approach to economic geography and urban planning. Her over-arching aim is to explore how new theoretical, conceptual and political possibilities for more socially just forms of economy can be re-imagined and put into practice. Seeking to understand the tensions between economy and society as uneven, and politically-charged processes that are necessarily manifest in and through situated, relational social and material contexts, Erica’s research is distinctive, suggesting that what we value and how we value it matters enormously to the form of our emerging life worlds.

Erica’s approach to teaching seeks to stimulate and support students to engage with a subject, learn and explore. Her aim is to challenge students to think critically and reflectively, motivating them to change, adapt and re-form their existing knowledges by creating new linkages between ideas and perceptions of themselves and the world. Specialising in economic geography, methods, local economic development and planning, Erica implements a wide range of interactive tools and activities to foster a holistic and positive learning experience.

Erica is also the Executive Director for the MSc Local Economic Development programme. 

Research areas:

A Value Approach to Political Economy:
Adapting and reposing Roger Lee’s work on the Ordinary Economy, Erica’s PhD explored how processes of neoliberalization necessarily emerge in-and-through existing multiple and complex socio-spatial relations. Focusing on the marketisation of Higher Education in England, her PhD won the Royal Geographic Society Best PhD in the UK Economic Geography Research Group, 2016.

A Value Approach to Planning:
Collaborating with colleagues from the Regional and Urban Planning Studies Programme (RUPS) at the LSE, this work suggests that planning is entrenched in values and practices of value due to its fundamental role in planning for diverse material and social forms of society-economy.

Land Tenure Regularisation in Dar es Salaam:

This collaborative work with colleagues from RUPS and Economic Geography explores informal and formal institutions of land tenure security in Dar es Salaam. Every year, around 6 million people, world-wide, settle in slums. Thus, land tenure formalisation represents an increasingly urgent structural challenge to sustainable urban development and poverty reduction - particularly in developing contexts. As a rapidly growing city in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam presents an interesting and important case for exploring and theorising how embedded informal institutions affect structural change and inclusive economic growth in a Global South context.