About
Austin Zeiderman is Professor of Geography 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. 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.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia over two decades, Zeiderman seeks to advance debates from diverse scholarly traditions while pushing them to engage with the major social and environmental challenges of the present. Motivating this work is a commitment to understanding hierarchical relations among different categories of humans and their entanglement with relations between people and the planet.
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). 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 hierarchies of vulnerability and victimhood.
Austin’s second monograph, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River (Duke 2025), uncovers the centrality of the waterway to the expansion of colonialism and capitalism in the Americas. The book expands the understanding of present and future environmental crises by showing how inequality and extractivism are intrinsically linked. The account foregrounds the plan to create a logistics corridor along the river, highlighting the centrality of racialisation to contemporary ecological predicaments. Artery was a finalist for the Julian Steward Award of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. Watch the trailer for the book here.
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.
