Ryan Centner

Dr Centner is an urban geographer and sociologist who studies how people move, create senses of belonging, and struggle over the shape of the cities they inhabit. His comparative, ethnographically grounded research spans the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific. It is organised around four intersecting strands:

• mobilities, from transnational migration to aviation (i.e., airports and airlines), especially as they act as instruments of urban development;
• queer geographies of sexuality, belonging, and home, particularly among LGBTQ+ migrants;
• the making, unmaking, and representation of cities;
• spatialised politics and policy, including the planning predicaments of territories and other formations of exceptional sovereignty.

A sustained engagement with urban and social theory runs throughout. He works extensively in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and also in Turkish.

Ryan received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped create the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Before joining LSE, he taught at Tufts University in International Relations, Latin American Studies, Sociology, and Urban & Environmental Planning. He has held visiting teaching or research affiliations in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Irvine, Los Angeles, Paris, Portland, and Salamanca. He is a Faculty Affiliate of the LSE Middle East Centre and the LSE US Centre (as well as formerly of the now-defunct LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre).

His current projects include a monograph, Gay Expats: London, Dubai, Buenos Aires. It compares how privileged yet marginalised gay migrants negotiate belonging under radically different urban environments and sociolegal regimes of sexuality, building on his recent comparative work on the “everynight politics” of queer nightlife. He is also co-authoring A People’s Guide to Portland. The book is a social history of planning, exclusion, and struggles for justice in the city.

With Dr Latifa Albader (Kuwait University), he is researching the changing geographies of aviation in the Arabian/Persian Gulf, funded by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (2025–2027). He is also developing work on development and planning in the US Pacific territories and ‘freely associated states’, including a special issue on planning in territorial and quasi-territorial contexts.

With Prof Leonard Nevárez (Vassar College), he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Urban Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2027), contributing its introduction and a chapter on the itineraries and toolkits of urban theory. His work has appeared in:

• City & Community
• Contexts: Sociology for the Public
• Environment & Planning A: Economy & Space
• Environment & Planning C: Politics & Space
• Geoforum
• the International Journal of Cultural Policy
• the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
• Local Environment
• the Nordic Journal of Urban Studies
• Political Power & Social Theory
• The Sociological Quarterly

Ryan is Programme Director of the MSc in Human Geography and Urban Studies. His teaching has twice been recognised with the LSE Excellence in Education Award, in 2022–23 and 2024–25.

Field teaching is at the heart of his approach to education. He coordinates the Department’s international undergraduate field trip, which currently runs in Singapore. It previously went to Portland, Oregon (2023–2026), Havana, and New York City. Following each Portland trip, he and his colleague Dr Laura Antona worked with participating students to co-produce a series of field reports. He has also led repeated field courses in Cape Town, Geneva, and Lyon.

Ryan has chaired both the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group and the Urban Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. He has served as associate editor of City & Community and as “In Pictures” section editor of Contexts: Sociology for the Public. He sits on the editorial board of the Nordic Journal of Urban Studies and serves on the LSE Research Ethics Committee. Vivid urban photography remains one of his passions, and is always a part of his research and teaching: images can tell so many stories, as well as opening up countless questions worth exploring.

Research interests

Thematic areas:

• aviation (airlines and airports)
• infrastructure
• migration
• nightlife and nocturnal geographies
• queer geographies and sexualities, including LGBTQ+ migration
• redevelopment and urban transformation
• research methods (especially fieldwork and qualitative research design)
• ‘territories’ and other quasi-sovereign entities
• urban politics and populism
• urban theory

Research locations:

• Cascadia (or, the Pacific Northwest of the USA and Canada)
• Latin America (especially Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela)
• the Middle East (especially Kuwait, Lebanon, Turkey, and the UAE)
• Africa (especially Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa)
• the ‘American’ Pacific (especially Guam, Hawai’i, American Samoa, and the countries and territories of Micronesia)
• London

Advising

Completed PhD students:

• Dr Sandiswa (Zo) Mapukata (2026), “‘Like queer summer camp’: Disjunctive comparisons of performative Black queer place-making processes in Johannesburg and London”
• Dr Émmanuel Awohouedji (2025), “A street called hope: Urban masculinities and place-making in Benin’s age of revelation”
• Dr María Lucrecia Bertelli (2025), “Dissident feminist geographies: Urban feminist activism and place-making in contemporary Buenos Aires”
• Dr Frida Timan (2024), “The permitting city: Affective legal rule in settler-colonial Vancouver”
• Dr Ulises Moreno-Tabárez (2019), “Spectral Latinidad: The work of Latinx migrants and small charities in London”
• Dr Pablo Navarrete-Hernández (2017), “From survival to social mobility: supporting the informal economy in Santiago de Chile”
• Dr Tucker Landesman (2016), “Remaking Rio through ‘favela integration’: The politics of mobility and state space”

Current PhD students:

• Hopkins, Cata: middle classes, public space, and development in 21st-century Lagos
• López-Oggier, Fernando: border studies, political geography, queer postcolonial migrants and their lifeworlds in London
• Öğüt, Tuna: Istanbul, trans movements, urban planning and politics

Dr Centner welcomes applications from potential PhD students interested in the following topics and areas:

• queer and LGBTQ+ geographies, especially migration, nightlife, and belonging
• urban innovation, development, and inequality in Cascadia
• development and planning in ‘territories’ of the US or other powerful countries with non-sovereign, non-integrated territorial possessions
• aviation and related infrastructure in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Pacific, or the western USA/Canada

Teaching

Current:

• Contemporary Debates in Human Geography & Urban Studies
• International Undergraduate Field Trip
• London’s Geographies
• Qualitative Research Techniques in Geography
• Urban Futures
• Urban Geography & Globalisation

Previous teaching:

• Cities of the Global South
• Development, Culture & Urban Inequality in Cuba (field course in Havana)
• Geographies of Social Change, Urbanism & Regional Development in the Pacific Northwest (field course in Portland)
• Globalisation & Social Change
• Islam & Europe
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Sociology of the Built Environment
• Urban Planning & Development in Africa (field course in Cape Town)
• Urban Sociology
• Urban Theory & Policy in the Global South
• Urban Transformations

Publications

Centner, Ryan. 2025. ‘The Everynight Politics of Expatriate Gay Men across the Global South: Forging Community in Buenos Aires, Flirting with Nonexistence in Dubai’. The Sociological Quarterly 66(4):811–41. doi: 10.1080/00380253.2025.2504962.

Centner, Ryan. 2025. ‘Infrastructure, Empire, and Connection in the “American” Pacific’. Contexts 24(3):52–67.

Centner, Ryan. 2025. ‘Queering Transnational Movement: Beyond Heteronormative Migration and Borders’. In Taking Root? Cosmopolitan Perspectives on Migrations, edited by Deirdre Oakley. Kendall Hunt.

Centner, Ryan, and Mara Nogueira. 2024. ‘Geographies of Entitled Anger: Revanchist Populism in Brazil and Beyond’. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 42(4):501–8. doi: 10.1177/23996544241254249.

Centner, Ryan. 2023. ‘Imaginative, Extroverted Havana’. Contexts 22(3):48–61. doi: 10.1177/15365042231192500.

Centner, Ryan, and Manoel Pereira Neto. 2021. ‘Peril, Privilege, and Queer Comforts: The Nocturnal Performative Geographies of Expatriate Gay Men in Dubai’. Geoforum 127:92–103. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.09.007.

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