Stephanie Wakefield

Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer specializing in critical infrastructure studies, urban resilience and adaptation, and social-ecological systems thinking and design. She is currently Director and Assistant Professor of Human Ecology at Life University in Atlanta Metro. Before joining Life, she was an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at Florida International University and taught urban environmental studies for many years in New York, including as Visiting Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College and Instructor of Urban Studies at Queens College.

Her research critically explores experimental sea rise adaptations in global cities including Miami and New York and suggests new possibilities for urban theory and design in the age of climate change. She is author of Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space and co-editor of Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World, and she regularly publishes articles in leading international journals such as Urban Geography, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Geoforum, and Geography Compass.

💾 Twitter @stephwakefield_ 
💎 stephaniewakefield@gmail.com

Selected publications

Lauren Rickards, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield, “Innovation at the Limits of Social Change: Uncertainty and Design in the Anthropocene,” in: Barnett, C. and Ballard, R., eds, Handbook of Social Change. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022: 142-153.

Stephanie Wakefield, Sarah Molinari, and Kevin Grove, “Crypto-Urban Statecraft: Post-Pandemic Urban Governance Experiments in Miami,” Urban Geography, OnlineFirst, 2022

Stephanie Wakefield, “Critical Urban Theory in the Anthropocene,” Urban Studies, 59, no. 5, 2022: 917–936

Stephanie Wakefield, Kevin Grove, and David Chandler, “Asymmetrical Anthropocene Thinking and The Limits of Resilience,” cultural geographies. OnlineFirst, 2021

Stephanie Wakefield, “Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene,” in: Chandler, D. Müller, F, and Rothe, D (eds) International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Actors, New Agencies and New Approaches. London: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2021

David Chandler, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield (eds) Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020

Stephanie Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020

Stephanie Wakefield, “Making Nature into Infrastructure: The Construction of Oysters as a Risk Management Solution in New York City,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 3, 2020: 761–785

Stephanie Wakefield, “Urban Resilience as Critique: Problematizing Infrastructure in Post-Sandy New York City,” Political Geography, 79, 2020

Stephanie Wakefield, “Life Beyond the Liberal One World World,” In: Wakefield, S, Grove, K, and Chandler, D (eds) Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020

Stephanie Wakefield, “Miami Beach Forever? Urbanism in the Back Loop.” Geoforum, 104, 2019: 34-44

Stephanie Wakefield, “Amphibious Architecture Beyond the Levee,” Mobilities 4, no. 3, 2019

Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun, “Oystertecture: Infrastructure, Profanation and the Sacred Figure of the Human,” Hetherington, K. (ed.) Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018

Stephanie Wakefield, “Infrastructures of Liberal Life: From Modernity and Progress to Resilience and Ruins,” Geography Compass, 12, no. 7, 2018

Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield, “Destituent Power and Common Use: Reading Agamben in the Anthropocene,” Coleman, M. and Agnew, J. Geographies of Power. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018

Stephanie Wakefield Wakefield, “Inhabiting the Anthropocene Back Loop,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices, and Discourses, 6, no. 1, 2017

Stephanie Wakefield, “Field Notes from the Anthropocene: Living in the Back Loop,” Brooklyn Rail, June 2017

Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun, “Inhabiting the Post-Apocalyptic City,” Society and Space online, 2014

Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun, “Governing the Resilient City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1, 2014: 4-11

Elizabeth Johnson, Harlan Morehouse, Simon Dalby, Jessi Lehman, Sara Nelson, Rory Rowan, Stephanie Wakefield and Kathry Yusoff “After the Anthropocene: Politics and Geographic Inquiry for a New Epoch,” Progress in Human Geography, 38, no. 3, 2014: 439-456

Translation: Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Destituent Power? Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, no. 1, 2014: 65-74