Nina Roberts

I am a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  My current research centers on problems of gentrification, displacement, socioeconomic inequality, and the impacts of climate change and associated redevelopment on urban populations in the American Southwest.  I focus on the contradictions of this decade's urban responses to climate change:  a crisis often framed as a "climate emergency" but whose proposed solutions may be anything but sustainable.

Before coming to the University of Illinois, I earned my BA in Geography and MA in Geography and Environmental Studies from Chicago's Northeastern Illinois University.  My master's thesis at Northeastern engaged historical and urban geography to examine the early twentieth-century intersection of gentrification and tourism in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The city’s pursuit of economic growth, based on appropriated regional Indigenous culture, led to Santa Fe’s carefully choreographed reinvention as an elite tourist destination.

I continue to interrogate urban growth discourses and their reification in Southwestern cities, where addressing climate change is of immediate urgency, as is the potential inequity of climate-driven redevelopment on marginalized urban communities.  This exploration also addresses climate justice for these communities, whose precarious circumstances are exacerbated by the region's colonial past and present.