Dr Amber Murrey

Amber joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2018, having previously held academic positions at the American University in Cairo, Clark University in Massachusetts and Jimma University in Ethiopia. Prior to this, she was the Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship in African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College.

Amber is a decolonial political geographer, ethnographer and educator. Her research on resistance and social change in Africa is empirically grounded and integrates the political geographies of environmental and socio-political struggles with decolonial theory and resistance studies. For the last decade, her work has considered the connections between resource extraction (particularly crude oil), social change and the knowledge-development nexus in contemporary African societies. She has published more than a dozen chapters, articles and reviews, some of which have featured in the pages of Annals of American Geographers, Political Geography, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Third World Quarterly, Review of African Political Economy and more. She is the editor of 'A Certain Amount of Madness': The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara (2018).

As a decolonial political geographer, Amber has four interrelated research concentrations:

• Decolonial geographies of violence, extraction and resistance in Central and West Africa
• Anti-racist Black and African geographies, decolonising international development and the politics of decolonising knowledge in, from and with the South
• The role of the social scientist in social change (particularly in capitalist extraction and post-extraction), as well as tensions in intellectual practices and knowledge paradigms
• Decolonising methodologies and decolonial futures, including experimental and experiential ways of knowing, filmmaking, narrative and creative writing.

Her research on oil violence, politics and resistance in Central Africa was awarded a 2019 Oxford Inspiration Award and her book on the topic, Slow Dissent, Fast Capitalism: A Decolonial Mixtape of the Afterlives of Extraction in Central Africa, is in progress. This work is an ethnographic analysis of the epistemic and infrastructural violence that both preceded and accompanied the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. Her research seeks to contribute to the on-going project of opening the sub-discipline of political geography to non-Euro-American epistemological orderings of place and power by asserting the centrality of Cameroonian epistemologies of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) for considerations of resource extraction. She frames her ethnographic project as a 'decolonial mixtape' as a means to bring attention to creative practice as integral to knowledge politics. As part of this work, she collaborated with a team of Cameroonian filmmakers and musicians, including Christian Soumalek of the Cameroonian hip-hop reggae group, Sumanja, and the Cameroonian filmmaker Gizo Fokwang, to produce a 45-minute ethnographic documentary and is currently working with comedians to produce a film on humour and environmental justice in Cameroon. She has recently received funding through The John Fell Fund to expand her work on the geographies of resistance and repression in Cameroon.

Amber is writing a co-authored book (with Dr Nicholas Jackson), Extraction and the Social Scientist: Power, Politics and Agency Between the Scholar and the Corporation, about the various roles that social scientists perform within the rapid and protracted timelines of extraction. Through a political economy that draws on the geographies and anthropologies of corporate entities and scholarship on the geo- and political-politics of 'expert' knowledge within international development and extractive logics in areas of Africa and Asia, the book interrogates the fluctuating roles and influences of social scientists in the logistical, cultural, and economical administration of extractive projects.

Her edited book, 'A Certain Amount of Madness': The Life, Legacies and Politics of Thomas Sankara (2018, Pluto Press) looked at the Pan-African political and ecological legacies of the former President of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. This is the first book-length consideration of the significance of Sankara's political thought and praxis in English. The book has been featured on African politics reading lists and in the popular media, including on the BBC World News programme, The Forum. Amber was invited to speak about the importance of teaching Sankara's visions for a decolonised international political economy at Oxford's historic 2020 Rhodes Must Fall Freedom Summer.

Collaborations

Amber's work is shaped by a decolonial impetus and conviction that scholarship be active, engaged, accessible and decolonising. A central component of her work has been meaningful North-South engagement and collaboration, and she has collaborated on a number of projects with artists, activists and scholars in Ethiopia, Egypt, Cameroon and South Africa, including films and workshops. In 2015, she coordinated a five-day transdisciplinary workshop Setting Forth At Dawn: A Workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Working at Jimma University, Ethiopia. In 2017, she organised a two-day workspace funded by the journal Human Geography on decolonising academic writing and teaching through creative expression, Decolonizing Communicative Praxis with "Words That Remake Life" at Clark University, US. She collaborated with stand-up comedians, artists, and scientists in 2023 to host a two-day workshop on comedy, the environment, and justice in Cameroon. She is the recipient of two British Academy Writing Workshop Grants (2020 and 2024), which have supported Early Career Researchers working on ‘defiant scholarship in Africa’ in Yaoundé, Cameroon and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Undergraduate

At Mansfield College and the School of Geography and the Environment, Amber has developed coursework for geography undergraduates that looks at non-Western epistemologies, extraction and critical development, decolonial thought, decolonising research methodologies and more. Along with Professor Patricia Daley, she convenes an FHS option on "Critical Development Geographies". Her tutorials and teaching occasionally move beyond the classroom to include more experiential and experimental forms of learning. She has incorporated walking tours of the city of Oxford, for example, to encourage students to consider the histories of imperialism through the architecture and spatiality of the city and the university. In 2020, she collaborated with Dr Ash Parton to host a 'Geographical Food Journey' that culminated in a multisensory, blindfolded food theatre for undergraduate students. The final event was curated by a food justice organisation, Community Centred Knowledge.

Postgraduate

Amber delivers modules on Extraction and Capitalism, Race and Nature for Nature and Society and Decolonising Research Methods and Decolonial, Postcolonial and Subaltern Geographies for Research Methods as part of the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance. She teaches Decolonising Conservation for the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management.

Amber and her colleagues, Dr Steven Puttick (Education, Oxford) and Dr Nokuthula Hlabangane (Anthropology, The University of South Africa), were awarded a 2020 Oxford Teaching Development and Enhancement Project Award for the development of a collaborative and innovative digital postgraduate course, Decolonising Research Methods in the Social Sciences. The project seeks to develop creative solutions for an integrated approach to challenge knowledge inequalities and nurture critical engagement through a 6-week co-taught course. The project seeks to contribute to conversations on the logistics of decolonising content, decolonising pedagogy and decolonising North-South knowledge divisions through an inclusive and interactive digital space in which students build, challenge and apply knowledge of the rich scholarship on decolonising research methods in the social sciences.

Amber welcomes enquiries from students wishing to undertake doctoral or post-doctoral research in the following, or related, areas: decolonial political geography and/or decolonial political ecology; anti-racist geographies and work on race in Africa; contestations of resource extraction and environmental justice; geopolitics of knowledge, epistemic (in)justice and social change; geographies of resistance and dissent; queering development, post-development and contesting development; and Pan-Africanism and/or non-western political geographies.

A full list of her publications is available at oxford.academia.edu/AmberMurrey