Nina Ebner, Assistant Professor of Social Geography, is a feminist, urban, and economic geographer. Her research explores the uneven socio-spatial relations that shape unjust urban political economies and ecologies, with a focus on lived experiences of economic and environmental inequality and their contestation.

For nearly eight years, Nina has been based in the urban U.S.-Mexico borderlands, using transnational, qualitative, and collaborative methodologies to examine the relationship between industrialization, border militarization, the politics of economic precarity, and climate change. She has published widely on these topics in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Global Social Policy, Third World Quarterly, NACLA, and IJURR. Nina is also working on Lives on the Line, a book project that traces the evolution of the U.S.-Mexico border region as a site of economic ‘competitiveness’ built on low-wage factory labor and border enforcement. In addition to exploring how workers use cross-border livelihood strategies to navigate economic uncertainty, she argues that the geopolitical border shapes the racialized and relational hierarchies of value that underwrite the devaluation of labor key to the borderlands’ political economy and to capitalism’s uneven development on a global scale. Alongside this book project, Nina is continuing her research on transnational geographies of social reproduction, examining how restructured social protection policies are reshaping landscapes of precarious labor in border cities. Alongside colleagues at Clark University and the University of Toronto, she is also engaged in a collaborative project that explores how urban political ecologies in the borderlands are shaping, and being shaped by, the climate crisis. This project investigates these relationships through the prism of extreme heat, with a focus on how border militarization shape municipal and community responses to new climate stressors. As a part of these projects, she has been very lucky to have learned with and from brilliant graduate and undergraduate students, and looks forward to continuing this work. Please reach out to Nina if you are a student interested in talking about working together.

Nina received her PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. She also holds an MSc in Community Development from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in Labor History from Yale University. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation, at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, in the Centro de Estudios Demográficos, Urbanos y Ambientales (CEDUA) and a postdoctoral Fellow at the UT Austin’s Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.