Sharlene Mollett

Sharlene Mollett is an Associate Professor cross-appointed with the Department of Human Geography, Centre for Critical Development Studies and the Graduate Program in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. As a feminist political ecologist and cultural geographer, her work interrogates multiple forms of power shaping land conflicts in Latin America.  Drawing insights from postcolonial, decolonial and critical feminist/racial studies in the Americas, Mollett examines the multiple ways race, gender and sexuality shape natural resource conflicts and land control embedded in a variety of international development projects, namely, protected area management, land registration and residential tourism development in Central America.

Broadly, her interests include how place-specific representations and meanings of race, gender and sexuality shape the lives of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and campesinos and their relations with each other, the state and elites. Mollett has published widely in a variety of top-tier geography and regional journals such as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Latin American Research Review, Gender, Place and Culture and Cultural Geographies. She currently holds the award and corresponding title, Distinguished Professor in Feminist Cultural Geography, Nature and Society at the University of Toronto, 2020-2024. In February 2021, Mollett will join the editorial team at Social and Cultural Geography.

Research Interests

• land and natural resource conflicts
• political ecology
• international development and racialization
• Latin America
• development geography
• poverty reduction strategies
• race, gender and property rights
• indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities
• feminist and postcolonial geographies
• development-induced displacement

Publications

Select Publications

• Mollett, S. 2020. Hemispheric, Relational and Intersectional Political Ecologies of Race: Centering land-body entanglements in the Americas. Antipode
• Van Sant, L., Milligan, R., and Mollett, S. (eds) 2020 Introduction, Political Ecologies of Race: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada. Antipode
• Mollett, S. 2020. Tourism as extraction: Unearthing coastal ontologies.. In Johnson and Zalik, Extraction, entanglements, and (im) materialities: Reflections on the methods and methodologies of natural resource industries fieldwork. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
• Mollett, S., Vaz Jones, L. and Delicado Moratalla, L. 2020. Feminist Political Ecologies: Race, bodies and the human, In Johnston, L., Datta, A., Hopkins, P., Olsen, E. and Maria Silva, J.(eds)  Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies. Routledge.
• Faria, C. and Mollett, S. 2020.  “We didn’t have time to sit still and be scared”: A postcolonial feminist geographic reading of ‘An other geography’ Dialogues in Human Geography.
• Mollett, S. 2018. Embodied histories of land struggle in Central America, In Van Sant et al. Historical Geographies of, and for, the present. Progress in Human Geography, Forum. 12-15. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0309132518799595
• Mollett, S. and Faria, C. 2018. The Spatialities of Intersectional Thinking: Fashioning feminist geographic futures. Gender, Place and Culture, 24(4):565-577.