Sophie Blackburn

 Sophie is a human geographer specialising in the relationship between uneven development and disaster risk. Her work examines the politics and governance of disasters: how power relations at multiple scales shape unequal geographies of vulnerability and resilience, the emergence and/or negotiation of local agency to resist or transform structural root causes of risk, and in particular how relations of trust, perceived fairness and expectation mediate these efforts. To date her research has focused empirically in the Caribbean, Andaman Islands, South India, Nepal and the USA, drawing conceptually on the political ecology of risk, critical development geography, citizenship and social contracts theory.

Sophie has a PhD in Human Geography and an MSc in Disasters, Development and Adaptation from King’s College London, and a BA in Geography from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the University of Reading in 2022, Sophie was Lecturer then Senior Lecturer in Development Geography at Oxford Brookes University (2019-2022), and before that an Early Career Fellow in Liberal Arts department at King’s College London (2017-2019). Her research is interdisciplinary and she has collaborated with anthropologists, philosophers, artists and physical scientists.

Sophie’s recent research includes an exploration of the politics of adaptation and relocation in Southern Louisiana (RGS-IBG funded), and the GCRF-funded international research hub Tomorrow’s Cities, which seeks to reduce disaster risk for the poor in rapidly growing cities of the global South. She was a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 Cross-Chapter Paper ‘Cities and Settlements by the Sea’, and has undertaken consultancy for the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). She has published in leading journals including Political Geography, Geoforum, Progress in Human Geography and Sustainability, and a co-edited book Megacities and the coast: Risk, Resilience and Transformation (Routledge).