Profile

Rosalind Fredericks

• Postdoctoral Research Scholar
  Committee on Global Thought
  Columbia University

Rosalind Fredericks earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned a MSc. in Geography and Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science from Brown University. Rosalind's research interests lie broadly at the nexus of political economy and cultural politics in African cities. She is particularly preoccupied with examining how political economic change - especially neoliberal globalization - is negotiated through identity politics and claims to urban space, with a specific focus on labor movements and the changing relevance of gender, youth, and Islam in Senegal's capital city, Dakar. Grounded in a critical ethnographic method, her dissertation examined the social history of garbage management in Dakar in the wake of structural adjustment as a lens into the changing landscape of citizenship in this important African democracy. As such, it engaged with debates on the political economy of development, the African state, and the postcolonial urban condition. As a postdoctoral scholar, Rosalind will be preparing her dissertation as a book manuscript while launching a complementary line of research into youth movements in Dakar and the Senegalese diaspora. Her general interests include postcolonial urbanism, youth studies, Islam, African political ecology and economy, critical development studies, and feminist geography.