����logo���

Overview

Biography

Mara is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences. She is an urban geographer with an interdisciplinary background in Geography and Economics and research expertise on urbanisation in the Global South with a focus on socio-spatial inequalities and grassroots mobilisation in Brazil. Her scholarship is committed to identifying the roots and ways of addressing socio-spatial inequalities with an aim to promote social justice.

She joined ����logo��� in 2020, having held a fellowship previously at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Highlights

• 2020-2023 - Co-Investigator of the project 

  Funded by the British Academy "Infrastructures of Wellbeing" programme
  

• 2024-2026 Principal Investigator of the project

  Funded by the British Academy "ODA International Interdisciplinary Research Projects 2024"

Administrative responsibilities

• Programme Director of the BSc Geography and International Development
• Research lead - Geography

Honours and awards

• Visting Fellowship Department of Geography and Environment, LSE , September 2024

ORCID

Research

Research overview

My current research lies at the intersection of critical development studies and postcolonial urban theory with a focus on how urban inequalities are (re)produced and challenged. I am interested in state-society relationships with an emphasis on marginalised populations in Brazil. My work pays attention to how urban policy may (re)produce or mitigate inequalities - along the lines of class, gender, and race – as well as how distinct groups organise to contest, resist, and shape policymaking and, consequentially, the city. My research can be broadly organised in three agendas.

First Research Agenda: Popular Economies

My third research agenda centres on the multiscalar geographies of popular economies, with recent attention to China’s growing influence in Latin America. Between 2018 and 2023, I investigated the local dimensions of Belo Horizonte’s informal economy with a focus on the impacts of exclusionary urban policies and street vendors’ resistance against displacement and for the right to the city centre.

My ongoing project, “Globalisation from below: livelihoods, trade, and transnationalism in Brazil’s informal economy,” investigates how Chinese migration and trade circuits impact livelihoods within Brazil’s informal economy, reflecting China’s growing role in global development dynamics. Supported by a British Academy/ODA International Interdisciplinary Research Projects grant (PI, £289,430), this project is an interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Economics and Architecture. It explores the role of Chinese migrants in transnationalising the local informal economy in Belo Horizonte, with a focus on cross-cultural relations and gendered dynamics. The research will engage participants in an artistic-cultural collaborative process and disseminate collective produced materials and findings through an arts exhibition. Further outputs include four academic papers, a podcast series and an open access monograph entitled “Transnational Informal Economy Atlas”. The project will contribute critical insights into China’s developmental influence, and I plan to further this research agenda in the future by expanding the scope to other Latin American countries.

Second Research Agenda: Urban food (in)justice

A second avenue of my research investigates food (in)justice in urban Brazil, as part of the British Academy-funded project “Engineering Food: Infrastructure Exclusion and ‘Last Mile’ Delivery in Brazilian Favelas” (2020–2023). As Co-Investigator, I collaborated with partners at the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre and INSPER (Brazil). This project examined the intersections of Brazil’s Zero Hunger policy and local food security initiatives, comparing Belo Horizonte—renowned for its innovative urban food policies—with São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city marked by stark inequalities. Through fieldwork in five low-income neighbourhoods (informal settlements), we explored how uneven access to urban infrastructure shapes food (in)security and documented grassroots initiatives addressing scarcity and exclusion amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The research emphasized the role of sustainable urban policy in fostering food justice and mitigating socio-spatial inequalities.

Watch this short documentary about the research: 

Third Research Agenda: Urban Governance

I engaged with this theme in my PhD research (completed in 2017 at LSE), which examined conflicts between citizens with the state to shape city-making in Belo Horizonte/Brazil in the years leading up to the 2014 World Cup. The thesis examined how urban struggles in the context of Brazil’s re-democratisation shaped the creation of urban participatory channels. In this context, it demonstrated that different groups – informal workers, informal residents and middle-class dwellers – were unevenly empowered to engage with the state and secure gains. I have published three papers from my doctoral research in internationally recognised journals (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, and Environment and Planning D). The research contributed to debates on urban policy by presenting an innovative critique of the limits of Brazil’s internationally recognised and acclaimed participatory model.

Research Centres and Institutes

• ,

Research projects

Post doctoral staff

• Jiawei Zhao

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Module convenor

• Cities in the Global South (L6/L7)
• Research Methods (L7)
  

 

Teaching modules

• Urban Sustainability
• Crossing Borders
• Humans and the Environment
• Literature Review
• Research Project
• Critical Infrastructures for Sustainability

Publications