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Professor Ash Amin, PhD

1931 Chair in Geography and Fellow of Christ's College

Biography

Professor Amin joined the Department in August 2011, after 16 years at Durham University where he was Professor of Geography and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study. He is known for his work on the geographies of modern living, for example thinking urban and regional society as relationally and materially constituted; and globalisation as an everyday process that thoroughly reconstitutes meanings of the local. He has also contributed to thinking on the economy as a cultural entity, while his writings on race and multiculturalism have helped change policy work on the management of ethnic diversity. He has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at a number of European Universities. He has been founding co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and is currently associate editor of City, and on the advisory board of a number of international journals. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the British Academy. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Edward Heath Prize in 1998 for contributions to research on Europe. He has served on the Research Priorities Board of the ESRC and advised international organisations such as the OECD and European Commission.

Career

  • 1982-2005 Newcastle University: Research Fellow and Research Associate, Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies; Lecturer and Professor, Department of Geography
  • 2005-2011 Durham University, Professor of Geography; Founding Executive Director of Institute of Advanced Study (from 2006)

Qualifications

  • 1979 BA Italian Studies Reading University
  • 1986 PhD Geography, Reading University

Research

In recent years, funded research has included grants from the ESRC on the ethnography of the UK social economy, while policy work has focused on urban cohesion and on racial integration, with independent scholarship oriented towards the biopolitics of race, imaginaries of belonging, urban dwelling, situated knowing, inter-personal recognition, and Left political renewal. His latest work is on cultures of calamity and on meanings of urban resilience.

Publications

Professor Amin has (co) authored or (co) edited 17 books and (co) written over 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Most recent books

  • Amin, A and N Thrift (2002) Cities: Re-imagining the Urban, Polity Press
  • Amin A and P Cohendet (2004) Architectures of Knowledge, Oxford University Press
  • Amin A and N Thrift (eds.) (2005) The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader, Blackwell
  • Amin A and J Roberts (eds.) Community, Economic Creativity and Organization, Oxford University Press
  • Amin A (ed.) (2009) The Social Economy, Zed Books
  • Amin A and M O'Neill (eds.) (2009) Thinking About Almost Everything, Profile Books.
  • Amin A and N Thrift (2012) Political Openings: An Essay on Left Futures, Duke University Press, forthcoming
  • Amin A (2012) Land of Strangers, Polity Press, forthcoming. [Podcast]

Most recent journal articles

  • Amin A (2006) 'The Good City', Urban Studies, 43, 5/6: 1009-1023
  • Amin A with N Thrift (2007) 'Cultural Economy and cities', Progress in Human Geography, 31, 2: 143-161.
  • Amin A (2007) 'Rethinking the urban social', City, 11, 1: 100-114.
  • Amin A and N Thrift (2007) 'On being political', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32: 112-115.
  • Amin A (2008) 'Collective culture and urban public space', City, 2, 1: 5-24
  • Amin A and J Roberts (2008) 'Knowing in action: beyond communities of practice', Research Policy, 37: 353-369.
  • Amin A (2009) 'Extraordinarily ordinary: working in the social economy', Social Enterprise Journal, 5, 1: 30-49.
  • Amin A (2010) 'Remainders of race', Theory, Culture and Society, 27, 1, 1-23

Teaching

  • Part II (final year) course Changing Cultures of Risk

External activities

  • Member, Managing Board, CRASSH Cambridge
  • Member, BASIS, British Academy Committee responsible for British Institutes abroad
  • Senior Fellow, Poeisis Programme on Designing Cities for the 21st Century, NYU