Amber Murrey, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
International Development and Social Change (IDCE)
10 Hawthorne Street, Room 41
Worcester, MA 01610-1477
Phone: 508-421-3839
Email: amurrey@clarku.edu
Amber Murrey researches and writes on transformations of life and place amidst structural, development and colonial violence(s); the dynamics of social and political resistance and co-optations of that resistance by state and corporate actors; and hegemonic and counterhegemonic intellectual practices and knowledge paradigms. Her Ph.D. research on oil politics and resistance in Central Africa as well as her collaborative work on the Pan-African legacy and philosophies of Thomas Sankara is shaped by a decolonial impetus and conviction that scholarship be active, attentive, accessible, decolonized. Amber completed her PhD dissertation, Lifescapes of a Pipedream: A Decolonial Mixtape of Structural Violence & Resistance Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, at Boston College, where she was the 2014/15 African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Write-Up Fellow.
Amber has held academic posts at Boston College and Clark University in the US as well as Jimma University in Ethiopia. She has a PhD in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford and a MA in Pan-African Studies from Syracuse University.
Research Interests/Specialization
Resistance, Social Change, Resource Extraction, Rural Livelihoods, Ideologies of Race in Development, Gendering Development, Race, Gender and Geography in Global Knowledge Paradigms, and Decolonizing Pedagogies and Curriculums.
Current Research & Teaching
While a Visiting Assistant Professor at Clark, Amber will be teaching Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Ideologies of Race in Development, Qualitative Research Methods, and an innovative new course that she has designed, Beyond Tokenism: Indigenizing, Feminizing, Queering Development.
Publications
Articles
Murrey A (in press 2016) "Imperial knowledge, decolonial geographies and working beyond "the language of the mouth," in Borders, Borderthinking, Borderland: Developing a Critical Epistemology of Global Politics, Marc Woons and Sebastian Weier
(eds). E-International Relations Publishing.
Murrey A (2016) The emotional geographies of slow resistance. The Singapore Journal for Tropical Geography, 37(2), pp. 224-248. SJTG Winner of Best Graduate Student Paper 2016.
Murrey A (2015) Invisible power, visible dispossession: The witchcraft of a subterranean pipeline. Political Geography 47, pp. 64-76.
Murrey A (2015) Narratives of life and violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. Human Geography — A New Radical Journal, 8(1), pp. 15-39.
Murrey A (2015) "Sankara, Thomas (1949-87)." The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Saër Bâ Maty and Immanuel Ness (eds.) London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Elliot-Cooper A, Murrey A, Kumar A, and Younis M (2014) Introduction: Labour and resistance across global spaces. City — Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 6, pp. 771-775.
Campbell H and Murrey A (2014) Culture-centric preemptive counterinsurgency and US Africa Command: assessing the role of the US social sciences in military engagements in Africa. Third World Quarterly 35(8), pp. 1457-1475.
Edited Special Editions
Smith T, Leck H, Murrey A (forthcoming 2017) 'What Witchcraft is this?' Global Encounters between Magic, Spiritual Ontologies and Development. Co-editor of Special Edition of Third World Thematics.
Elliot-Cooper A, Murrey A, Kumar A, Younis M (2014) Labour and resistance across Global spaces. Co-editor of Special Edition of City — Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 6.
Reviews
Murrey A (2016) Subterranean estates: life worlds of oil and gas. Edited by Hannah Appel, Aarthur Mason and Michael Watts. Antipode — A Radical Journal of Geography.
Murrey A (2015) "Concerning violence." Directed by Göran Olsson. Produced by Final Cut for Real, Helsinki Filmi Oy, Louverture Films. 2014. Journal of Black Studies 1(6), 1-6.
Murrey A (2014) Extended review: Learning from the African awakenings of 2011 struggle and acts of imagination. Capital & Class 38(3), pp. 622-625.
Murrey A (2014) "Le Président." The Postcolonialist. June 2014 Edition.
Murrey A (2014) Pan-African classics — Walter Rodney.Africa in Words.
Murrey A (2011) Barack Obama and Twenty-first Century politics, Horace Campbell. Imhotep: Africana Studies Graduate Student Journal 2(1), pp. 38-41.
Commentary & Invited Pieces
Murrey A (in press 2016) "When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion": Reflections on scholar-decolonisers in the 21st Century. The Oxford Left Review, Issue 15.
Murrey A (in press 2016) Thomas Sankara: 'Let us consume only what we ourselves control.' The Afrikanist 1(1).
Murrey A (2016) Writing Revolution — The Autobiography of Stokely Carmichael. The African Exponent.
Murrey A, Islam M, Mubangizi O. (2016) Reflections on Setting Forth at Dawn: A Workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Writing, Jimma University (Ethiopia) The Review of African Political Economy.
Murrey A (April 2016) 'Our stomachs will make themselves heard': What Sankara can teach us about food justice today. African Arguments. Murrey A (2016) Scholars, activists, & farmers join in Harare to address rural social justice: Report on the Agrarian South-South Summer School. Grain & farmlandgrab.org and Pambazuka, Issue 763.
Murrey A (03/11/2014) Burkina Faso's Revolution. Ceasefire Magazine.
Murrey A (09/05/2014) Geographies of resistance. Ceasefire Magazine.
Murrey A (15/07/2014) Travelling to the UK? On the pain, separation and dehumanisation of student families from 'high risk' countries. Politics in Spires: Cambridge-Oxford Politics.
Murrey A (06/01/2014) Walter Rodney's legacy. Ceasefire Magazine.
Murrey A (08/11/2012) Thoughts on 30 years of Biya power in Cameroon. Pambazuka, Issue 605.
Murrey A (10/02/2012) Le rap mboa: Conversations on Cameroonian rap and politics. Politics in Spires: Cambridge-Oxford Politics.
Murrey A (20/03/2012) The Revolution and the Emancipation of Women: A reflection on
Sankara's speech, 25 years later. Pambazuka, Issue 590.
Murrey A (20/05/2012) The political-economic roots of haggling in Dakar, Senegal. Politics in Spires: Cambridge Oxford Politics.
Murrey A (14/03/2012) Slackers and saviours: Kony 2012. Politics in Spires: Cambridge-Oxford Politics.
Murrey A (02/07/2012) US military finances research on rape in DR Congo. Politics in Spires: Cambridge Oxford Politics.
Murrey A (04/12/2011) Connections between the hydrocarbon scramble and U.S. troop deployment in Uganda? Politics in Spires: Cambridge-Oxford Politics.