Dr Amber Murrey

Dr Amber Murrey is Associate Professor in Human Geography, Fellow and Tutor at Mansfield College, and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Geography & the Environment (2025–2028) at the University of Oxford. A political geographer, ethnographer, and educator, she examines power, anti-imperial liberation, and resistance in contemporary African contexts, with a focus on authoritarianism, corporate power, and the political economies of extraction. She represents the Social Sciences Division on the Joint Student Mental Health Committee (from 2025).

Amber is the author of Knowledge making, sacrifice, reciprocity: two decades of research along an oil pipeline (forthcoming), Decolonizing Development Studies: Learning Disobedience (with Patricia Daley in 2023), and editor of 'A Certain Amount of Madness': The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara (2018), the first English-language volume on the political thought and praxis of Thomas Sankara.

She is Chief Editor of African Geographical Review and serves on the advisory boards of Pambazuka Press, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Economy & Society, and Society and Space. From 2024–2025, she was a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Geography at Université de Yaoundé I and the Department of Peace & Conflict Studies at the University of Buea, Cameroon.

Amber's research centres on three interconnected areas:

• Examining geographies of state–corporate violence, extraction, and resistance in Central Africa
• Interrogating the roles of social scientists in capitalist extraction, militarism, and corporate practice
• Advancing anti-imperial epistemic praxis through creative and experimental methodologies such as filmmaking, narrative, and performance

Her forthcoming book, Knowledge making, sacrifice, reciprocity: two decades of research along an oil pipeline examines the epistemic and infrastructural violence surrounding the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, foregrounding the imperatives of research over the longue durée, Cameroonian epistemologies of la sorcellerie (witchcraft), and the politics of reciprocity as central to understanding extraction. The book treats creative practice as an essential part of knowledge politics. Amber collaborated with Cameroonian musicians and filmmakers, producing a 45-minute ethnographic documentary and is working, as part of a British Academy Wolfson Fellowship, to develop a short, animated film on the functions of social scientists in resource politics. Amber is co-authoring (with Dr Nicholas Jackson) Extraction and the Social Scientist: Power, Politics and Agency Between the Scholar and the Corporation, which analyses the political economies of corporate–academic entanglements in the geographies of extraction.

In recent years, Amber has expanded this work to explore the politics of comedy as a mode of dissent and critique in repressive states, as well as work on the interfaces of digital geographies and authoritarian violence in African societies. Amber holds a 2025/26 Independent Social Research Foundation Small Group Award for Global Africa in the Era of Fascism, a 2026 project aiming to explore how fascism operates globally through racial capitalism, colonial legacies, and authoritarian formations in global African societies.
 

Collaborations

Amber's scholarship is committed to meaningful, equitable, and reciprocal relations. She has worked with artists, activists, and academics in Ethiopia, Egypt, Cameroon, and South Africa. Highlights have included spearheading the following collectives:

• Setting Forth at Dawn: The Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Working (Jimma University, Ethiopia, 2015)
• Decolonizing Communicative Praxis with “Words That Remake Life” (Clark University, USA, 2017)
• A 2023 workshop on comedy, the environment, and justice in Yaoundé, Cameroon
• An upcoming mentoring and writing programme for scholars working in contexts of violence, co-led with Dr Sneha Krishnan and funded by a 2025 Oxford Teaching Development and Enhancement Project Award
• She has received multiple British Academy Writing Workshop Grants (2020, 2024) for collaborative projects to combat corporate dominance in academic publication in Cameroon and Ethiopia. These workshops have focused on resisting coloniality in the university, encouraging early-career African scholars to write with boldness and sharp critique. These collaborative projects have led to a forthcoming special issue of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, co-edited with Dr Netsanet Gebremichael (Addis Ababa University), with an afterword by Professor Patricia Daley (Oxford).

She serves as the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)’s Race, Culture & Equality Working Group (from 2025) and previously co-convened Oxford’s Political Worlds Research Cluster (2019-2022). 
 

Undergraduate

Amber teaches across political geography, decolonial thought, Marxism, extraction and critical development, and research methodologies. With Professor Patricia Daley, she co-convenes the FHS option Critical Development Geographies. Her teaching often leaves the classroom, using walking tours of Oxford to explore the city’s imperial geographies, or multisensory events like the Geographical Food Journey (2020), a blindfolded food theatre curated with Community Centred Knowledge.

Postgraduate

She teaches on the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, including as Convenor of the Environmental Justice Module (2025 onwards), as well as the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management. She co-developed Decolonising Research Methods in the Social Sciences, a six-week digital course that fosters critical engagement with decolonial pedagogy for PhD students at Oxford and multiple African universities, alongside Dr Steven Puttick (Oxford) and Dr Nokuthula Hlabangane (University of South Africa). The course culminated in Keeping the Fire, a student-produced short film capturing the collaborative and insurgent spirit of the programme.

Supervision

Amber welcomes doctoral and post-doctoral projects on:

• Geopolitics of knowledge and epistemic (in)justice
• Geographies of resistance, dissent, militarism and anti-imperialism, particularly in African societies
• Pan-Africanism and non-Western political geographies
• Contestations of resource extraction and environmental justice

Through her research, teaching, and collaborations, she works to contribute to projects to reshape the politics of knowledge and cultivate anticorporate and anti-imperial solidarities.

Current Graduate Research Students

Recent Graduate Research Students

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