Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer L. Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Urban and Environmental Planning program at the University of Virginia. Combining critical and creative approaches, her scholarship examines contradictions within environmental governance, particularly with reference to petrochemical industries and geographies. Lawrence’s work interrogates the systemic production of crises to understand how extractive logics of governance impact lived experiences directly in frontline communities and through the protracted disaster of climate change. Demonstrating spatiotemporal tensions between chronic and acute socio-environmental disasters and the role that the politics of perception plays in shaping the understanding of environmental degradation, Lawrence’s work highlights contradictions at the intersection of economic systems, resource extraction, and socio-environmental (in)justice. She earned her PhD in social, political, ethical, and cultural thought at Virginia Tech in 2015. Recent projects include Biopolitical Disaster (Routledge, 2017) and The Resilience Machine (Routledge, 2018,) and her work has recently been published in journals such as New Political Science, Geoforum, Political Geography, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Complex Risks and Resilience. She is currently working on a manuscript on the political ecology of disaster contextualized through the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which highlights the regulatory landscape of extreme energy, the protracted biopolitical effects of disaster management, as well as the possibilities for solidarity movements to address political and environmental crises.