I am a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on environmental, urban, and comparative-historical sociology. I’m especially interesting in conducting multi-scalar research integrating particular cases with large-scale spatial and historical processes. My current project investigates the Pacific island of Guåhan/Guam from the 1940s to the present. I show how urban and environmental dynamics intersect with the global geographies of US empire, premised on the strategic integration of islands like Guåhan to enact large-scale geopolitical agendas, tracing these interactions across time and space. Guåhan’s social and natural landscapes are caught between competing urban actors, like the US military, tourism-oriented growth machines, and indigenous environmental activists operating at and responding to multiple scales of social life. Scholars have commonly assumed urbanization and related environmental change to be an outcome of capital accumulation or economic conflicts waged in cities. My project, however, asks us to reevaluate urban political economy and urban political ecology, including through rethinking urban form, infrastructure development, land and water use, practices of exclusion and inequality, governance structures, and vulnerability to climate change and sea-level rise as more complex processes exceeding the city and entangled with geopolitics and empire.
Outside of academia, I enjoy reading and writing fantasy and science fiction, photography, and video games.
Kyle Galindez 