People

Dr. Kate Derickson

Kate 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, critical race theory and feminist epistemology 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 Sustainabilitly 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.

Dr. Madelaine Cahuas

Dr. Madelaine Cahuas is a critical human geographer and Latina feminist urban scholar. Her work examines how racialized migrant communities experience, negotiate, contest, and transform the cities in which they live. She particularly focuses on how Black, Brown, and Indigenous Latinx women, queer and non-binary people collectively organize at the grassroots level, within, alongside, and beyond the non-profit sector, to struggle for social justice and create alternative urban geographies.

Dr. Rebecca Walker

Rebecca 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

As a mixed methods researcher, I take pride in skillfully designing research that combines user needs and business goals to craft actionable product strategy recommendations. I have extensive ethnographic research experience through a variety of lenses, including Psychology, Sociology, and Human Geography (Anthropology of the Environment). Over 10 years of human-centered research experience, I have learned that the best insights come from a rigorous yet flexible approach that weaves together user-centricity and business strategy to deliver the best possible product.

Katie Wilson

Nicole 

Bonnie Keeler

Bonnie Keeler, Ph.D., 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

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.