Desiree Fields

desireefields.org

After graduating in 2013, Desiree Fields held a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor position in the department of urban studies at Queens College, where she taught courses in urban poverty and affluence, community organizing, and the future of New York City. While at Queens College Desiree became a research ally for the Right to the City Alliance, through which she produced “The Rise of the Corporate Landlord” a report on the role of private equity funds purchasing foreclosed properties, converting them to rental use, and securitizing the rental income. This exemplifies how Desiree’s research has developed synergistically through partnerships and collaborations with activists and community-based organizations.

In 2014 Fields moved to the UK to take a position as lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. In addition to teaching on globalization and qualitative research at Sheffield, she continues to research the rise of financial markets, actors and imperatives as a process of contemporary urban change, with an emphasis on post-crisis geographies of financialization in the US and Spain. Her work explores how financialization is contingent on and reproduces uneven urban development, how it transforms the uses and meanings of home, and how it inspires contestation by grassroots organizations and city residents. In keeping with her training in environmental psychology, Desiree’s approach to research is transdisciplinary, synthesizing urban and economic geography, social and cultural theories of finance, and critical perspectives on community organizing and development. Her work has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs; Urban Studies; Housing Policy Debate; Journal of Urban Health; Housing, Theory and Society; and Emotion, Space and Society