People

Kate Derickson

Dr. Kate Derickson is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, Director of Urban Studies and the managing editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.  Her work engages political economy and feminist theory to explore the politics of knowledge production and the relationship between scholarly knowledge and emancipatory social change.  She has been a member of the Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Think Tank for the past 10 years, a board member at the East Side Freedom Library and teaches in MN state prisons through TREC program.

Madelaine Cahuas

Dr. Madelaine Cahuas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. Her research engages Latinx Studies, human geography and intersectional feminisms to examine how racialized and migrant communities foster livable, healthy and sustainable urban spaces. She is currently working on two interrelated community-engaged research projects focused on housing and food justice in the Twin Cities supported by the McKnight Land Grant Professorship. 

Rebecca Walker

Dr. Rebecca Walker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society.  She is an urban political ecologist whose work focuses on geographies of race and nature.  Her research investigates how environmental injustices are produced, maintained, and unmade through policy and grassroots activism.  She studies how uneven power relations shape and are shaped through urban(izing) natures.   Her work considers historic and contemporary politics of urban green spaces, including topics such as green gentrification, green infrastructure, parks and racial equity, planning history, and climate justice.

Maggie Mills

Maggie is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society with research interests in property, political economy and social theory.  Maggie has a Master's degree in GIS from UMN.

Nicole Bekesz

Nicole is a PhD student in the Geography, Environment, and Society. She attended undergrad at the Ohio State University where she majored in Environmental Social Sciences and developed a critical perspective around social and environmental justice. Her work questions how we can envision and build a more just and sustainable world. 

Abby Debbink

Abby is an undergraduate Urban Studies student at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in studying social and urban inequities experienced by people of color. She believes the CREATE project will bring critical information to our Minneapolis neighbors about the complexities of tear gas in Metro Surge.

Paula Perez

Paula is a recent graduate who majored in Environmental Geography with a minor in Public Health. Her academic studies deeply inform my creative practices as a self published poet and recent participant in an art exhibit at Indigenous Roots. She has been collaborating with Dr. Cahuas on research relating to pedagogies of healing in urban spaces, interweaving themes of resilience, vulnerability, and connection and plans to apply to graduate school for Health Geography or Urban Planning.

Alexis Hernandez Gutierrez

Alexis is a graduate/undergraduate student in the 4+1 Urban and Regional Planning and Urban Studies Program. with multiple leadership experiences, community engagement projects, and program coordinator experiences. He is passionate about addressing systemic inequalities in the Twin Cities, including disparities in infrastructure, parks and recreation, and education access. He has been working under Professor Cahuas as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, conducting research on gentrification, transit access, and housing displacement. 

Alma Quiroz

I am an honors undergraduate currently majoring in Spanish and Sociology of Law, Criminology and Justice, in addition to minoring in Art. I have been assisting Dr. Madelaine Cahuas and Dr. Jessica Lopez Lyman (Chicano and Latino Studies) on their housing justice research project in the Twin Cities through the RISE scholars program as well as through the CREATE Initiative. After finishing my Bachelor's degree, I plan to continue with graduate school and research in the future in the area of law.  

Danny Walsh

Danny is a recent graduate of the Department of Geography, currently investigating tear gas and its deployment by the US government in urban areas. In 2025, Danny received a fellowship to live and work at Kunstverein Global Forest in Sankt Georgen im Schwarzwald, Germany, and co-received the 2025 John Adams Geography Award at the University of Minnesota. Danny works creatively with music and sound, and recently presented his work combining the pipe organ with AM radio field recordings at the Pillar Forum in Minneapolis. Currently, Danny is working on noise music derived from amplified and treated kazoos.

Bonnie Keeler

Dr. Bonnie Keeler is the Director of the Water Resources Center and the founding co-Director of CREATE.  Keeler works at the intersection of sustainability science and environmental economics, with particular expertise in water management and policy.

Hannah Ramer

Dr. Hannah Ramer is an instructor and advisor for the Urban Studies program. Before joining the department, she was a Policy Research Fellow through the Minneapolis-St. Paul Long-Term Ecological Research (MSP-LTER) program. Her research focuses on the relationship between nature and wealth inequality in the Twin Cities, touching on urban history, planning, property markets, and environmental justice. During her time at the MSP-LTER, she's gotten to contribute to projects examining parks and racial covenants, representations of nature in redlining maps, park planning in the face of green gentrification, and others.