Dr Amber Murrey

Dr Amber Murrey is a political geographer, ethnographer and educator whose scholarship examines power, extraction and resistance in African societies, with a particular focus on Cameroon. Her work brings the political geographies of extractive capitalism and coercive statecraft into conversation with questions about how knowledge itself is produced, authorised and mobilised within imperial and extractive systems. Across this body of scholarship, Murrey has forged a distinctive conceptual vocabulary, including 'slow dissent', 'localwashing' and 'defiant scholarship', through long-term ethnography and collaborative and creative methods. She is the Editor of African Geographical Review, a recipient of a British Academy/Wolfson Fellowship and a 2024–25 Fulbright Scholar to Cameroon. In 2026, she received the Royal Geographical Society-IBG's Taylor & Francis Award for excellence in higher-education teaching and learning. Dr Murrey has held academic appointments at Boston College, Clark University, Jimma University (Ethiopia), the American University in Cairo, and the University of Yaoundé I (Cameroon).

Murrey studies the political geographies of authoritarian and extractive power in African societies, and the forms of resistance, knowledge-making and worldmaking that emerge against them. A second strand turns the analysis towards the role of social science itself within extractive and imperial systems, developing anti-imperial approaches to research, pedagogy and creative practice. A central question animating this work is how authoritarian and extractive forms of power become durable. Across nearly two decades of ethnography in and with communities in Cameroon, Murrey has shown how extractive capitalism is organised through infrastructures, political institutions and systems of knowledge that determine whose expertise is authorised, whose losses become calculable and which forms of resistance become visible. This programme has generated new insights on displacement in-place, racialised localwashing, digital infrastructural harm and the labour of social scientists within extraction.

A central concern across her scholarship is the political life of resistance under conditions in which collective mobilisation is dangerous, fragmented or repeatedly interrupted. From long-term ethnographic research along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, Murrey elaborated the concept of slow dissent and her current monograph, Slow Dissent: Extractive Capitalism and Life under Repression in Cameroon, represents the culmination of this sustained research, advancing a theory of political life under enduring repression. Slow dissent theorises how political antagonisms persist across rupture and repression, including where organisations disappear, collective claims are defeated or political mobilisation is repeatedly foreclosed.

Her British Academy/Wolfson Fellowship, Extraction and the Social Scientist: Decolonising Research on the Politics of Knowledge, Agency and Resistance in Natural Resource Geographies, redirects this enquiry from communities targeted by extraction to the experts and institutions that make extraction knowable and governable. The project establishes social-scientific labour as a critical site through which extractive industries are governed, legitimised and contested. Based on interviews and extended conversations with approximately 70 social scientists across Africa, Oceania, Europe and North America, this work shifts attention from what social scientists know about extraction to what their labour does within extractive systems. This enquiry underpins her collaborative book with Nicholas Jackson, Extractive Capitalism and the Social Scientist, which theorises social-scientific labour as an infrastructural condition of extractive capitalism. It traces how expertise translates communities, conflicts, uncertainties and resistance into the categories and procedures through which extraction becomes assessable and governable, while asking when critical knowledge might instead interrupt, refuse or reorganise these relations.

Questions of knowledge, intellectual labour and the university also animate Murrey's work on anti-imperial pedagogy. With Patricia Daley, Murrey is the co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies (2023), which extends her earlier formulation of 'pedagogical disobedience' into a wider account of anti-imperial praxis, examining how colonial and imperial relations structure what can be known, taught and recognised within universities. In her 2021 Singapore Journal of Tropical Geographies Plenary Lecture with Daley at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference, they advance defiant scholarship as a repertoire of historical practices for confronting academic imperialism and coloniality within critical African geographies and academic knowledge production.

Collaborations

Dr Amber Murrey has built enduring intellectual partnerships with scholars, artists and activists in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Across more than a decade, these collaborations have created spaces for intellectual exchange, writing, mentoring and publication across unequal academic and geopolitical contexts. They have generated funded international programmes, research collectives, workshops and publications, while supporting networks of early-career scholars across Africa and beyond:

• 2024–present | Editor, African Geographical Review. Murrey serves as Editor of African Geographical Review, a leading international journal for geographical scholarship on Africa. Founded at Makerere University in 1963, the journal occupies a distinctive place in the discipline as a forum for advancing African geographical scholarship and strengthening the intellectual presence of African scholars within international geography. Published in association with the American Association of Geographers, AGR produces seven issues annually, with a consistent majority of its authors based at institutions on the African continent.
• 2025–present | Writing and mentoring in contexts of violence. With Dr Sneha Krishnan, Murrey is co-leading a mentoring and writing programme for scholars working in contexts shaped by violence, supported by a 2025 Oxford Teaching Development and Enhancement Project Award.
• 2025–present | Race, Culture & Equality Working Group. Murrey serves as Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)'s Race, Culture & Equality Working Group.
• 2025 | Provocations Between Black and African Geographies. Murrey was PI on an Independent Social Research Foundation Small Group Award for 'Provocations Between Black and African Geographies'. Convened in 2026, project placed Black and African geographies in sustained critical conversation, exploring what their conjunction makes possible for geographical thought amid resurgent fascism, racial capitalism and enduring imperial formations.
• 2023–2025 | Critical political economies of academic publication in Cameroon and Ethiopia. Murrey led and co-led successive British Academy-funded programmes supporting collaborative writing, mentoring and publication among early-career researchers in Cameroon and Ethiopia, including a two-year programme involving 40 early-career researchers. The project generated a 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).
• 2023 | Comedy, environment and justice, Yaoundé. Murrey convened a collaborative workshop in Yaoundé, Cameroon, bringing comedy into dialogue with questions of environmental politics and justice. The workshop advanced her wider methodological experimentation with artists, activists and scholars on modes of political communication and knowledge-making beyond conventional academic forms. The project was supported by the British Academy and Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund.
• 2017 | Decolonizing Communicative Praxis with 'Words That Remake Life' | Clark University, USA. This collaborative workspace extended earlier work in Ethiopia by bringing questions of language, decolonisation and communicative praxis into a transnational setting, exploring alternative practices for intellectual exchange and collective knowledge production. Project funded by Human Geography—A New Journal of Radical Geography.
• 2015 | Setting Forth at Dawn: The Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Working | Jimma University, Ethiopia. Murrey spearheaded this collaborative project on the geopolitics and everyday practices of academic labour. The workshop anticipated questions that have remained central to her subsequent collaborative work: how unequal institutional and geopolitical conditions shape who produces knowledge, how intellectual work travels, and what more equitable forms of academic collaboration might require. 

Undergraduate

Murrey's teaching has received sustained recognition, including a University of Oxford Social Sciences Division Teaching Excellence Award in 2022 and the Royal Geographical Society-IBG's Taylor & Francis Award for excellence in higher-education teaching and learning in 2026. She was shortlisted for the Vice-Chancellor’s Education Award in 2022.

Murrey teaches topics in political and cultural geography, environmental geographies, research methodologies, and more. 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, 2021), 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. 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

Her current and recent doctoral supervision spans extractive politics in Namibia and Zimbabwe, diaspora political activism and French intervention in Central Africa, geographies of resistance and Cop City in Atlanta, Walter Rodney's Marxist and anti-imperialist political thought, Sudanese geographies of identity and knowledge, and more. Murrey welcomes doctoral and post-doctoral projects on:

• extractive capitalism, environmental justice and political ecology
• geopolitics of knowledge and epistemic (in)justice
• geographies of resistance and anti-imperialism in African societies
• militarism, imperialism and coercive statecraft
• Pan-African thought and non-Western political geographies

Current Graduate Research Students

Recent Graduate Research Students

• Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Geography & the Environment, 2025-present
• Social Sciences Representative, Joint Student Mental Health Committee, University of Oxford, 2025-present
• Steering Committee Member, Race & Resistance Research Hub, University of Oxford, 2025-present
• Social Sciences Coordinator, Opportunity Oxford, University of Oxford, 2025-present
• Co-convenor, Political Worlds Research Cluster, University of Oxford, 2019-2022

A full list of her publications is available at https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8252-8308
and https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XPsTki0AAAAJ&hl=en

Amber Murrey
also published as Amber Murrey-Ndewa
ORCID: 0000-0001-8252-8308