Campus
- Scarborough (UTSC)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Economic Geography
- Environment & Climate
- Social & Political Geography
Areas of Interest
Political ecology, political economy, settler colonialism, forestry and land, agrarian change, property.
Biography
My writing and teaching are situated at the intersection of environmental and economic geography and both draw heavily on the tradition of political ecology. I’m interested in denaturalizing taken-for-granted landscapes and understanding the social production and contestation of what we commonly refer to as nature. Like many, including my colleagues, my research is focused on a number of questions about land: who owns; what are the layers of title (colonial and Indigenous); how does capital follow through it and transform it; how is it controlled and managed; who works on it; and how is it contested? I examine these questions through exploring the politics of forest lands and agrarian landscapes, principally, but not exclusively, in British Columbia, Canada.
Publications
Ekers, M., Brauen, G., Lin, T. and Goudarzi, S. (2021) The Coloniality of Private Forest Lands: Harvesting Levels, Land Grants and Neoliberalism on Vancouver Island’. The Canadian Geographer, 65(2): 166-183.
Ekers, M. (2019) Financiers in the Forests on Vancouver Island: On Fixes and Colonial Enclosures. Journal of Agrarian Change, 19(2): 270-294.
Ekers, M. and Prudham S. (2018) The Socio-Ecological Fix: Fixed Capital, Metabolism and Hegemony. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(1), 17-34.
Ekers, M. and Prudham S. (2017) The Metabolism of Spatial Fixes: Capital Switching, Spatial Fixes and the Production of Nature. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(6), 1370-1388.
Ekers, M., Loftus, A., Hart, G., Kipfer, S. (Eds.) (2013) Gramsci: Space, Nature and Politics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, (Wiley-Blackwell Antipode Book Series)