Faculty

Alero Akporiaye teaches courses on international politics and international political economy, including political economy of global supply chains, international human rights and law, and gendered political economy. Her courses examine how international political forces affect socioeconomic processes, events and outcomes.

Akporiaye's research interests are broadly centered on the politics of foreign direct investment: political risk and multinational corporations, political economy of energy extraction, corporate social responsibility and experimental methods in international political economy.

Namita Dharia is a socio-cultural anthropologist and an architect who does research on urban South Asia. Her interest in urban areas developed during her studies and career as an architect and urban designer in India in the late ’90s. Her areas of expertise range from urban political economy and environmental studies to architecture and planning and from labor and design studies to new materialisms.

Dharia is the author of The Industrial Ephemeral Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction, an ethnography of the building construction industry in India’s National Capital Region. Dharia is currently working on a book length project that studies the relationship of rest and sleep to urban environments, asking what does it mean for people, spaces, and the planet to rest?

Xiangli Ding is a historian of modern China and environmental history, he offers courses on global environmental history, East Asian history, and Chinese history. In the past two decades, he witnessed and experienced the environmental degradation and social changes in China. Therefore, his research interests focus on the confluence of nature, technologies, economy, and political forces in modern China, and how that confluence has changed Chinese people’s lives and their relationship with the natural environment. His dissertation, entitled “Transforming Waters: Hydroelectricity, State Making, and Social Changes in Twentieth-Century China”, examines the rise of hydroelectricity in modern China. It argues that political powers, aided by hydro-technologies, consumed natural resources at an unprecedented pace and scale and marginalized local communities in the making of an environ-technical regime in twentieth-century China.

Jonathan Bishop Highfield is the author of Food and Foodways in African Narratives: Community, Culture, and Heritage and Imagined Topographies: From Colonial Resource to Postcolonial Homeland. His essays have been published in several books and journals, including Antipodes; Atlantic Studies; Canadian Journal of Irish Studies; The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability; The Jonestown Report; Kunapipi; Passages; and Rupkatha.

In his research and teaching, Highfield explores the intersection between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, focusing on the nexus of social justice, colony and ecology, and the role of food and foodways in novels, films and art. His courses taught include Design in Words, Suffera No More: Caribbean Literature and Politics and Dialogue Across the Diaspora: Haiti, South Africa, Art, and Narratives of Resistance, a travel course in association with the Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town, and the Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.

Andrew Robarts teaches courses on Islam and the Islamic World, Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, focusing on questions of identity in the imperial context, migration and mobility, regionalism, and international relations.

Robarts' first book investigated migration and the spread of epidemic diseases in the maritime space of the Black Sea region. This analysis was undertaken within the context of Ottoman/Turkish-Russian relations in the modern period. His current manuscript project will, from a world historical perspective, survey Russian influence in, interaction with and impact on the Middle East across the early modern and modern periods.

Damian White is a sociologist and political theorist with teaching and research interests in the sociology of design, architecture, and adaptive reuse; speculative futures; urban and environmental sociology with a particular interest in urban political ecology; historical and political sociology; critical theory, urban studies and photography. He has published four books to date, including a comprehensive appraisal of the work of the social theorist and political ecologist Murray Bookchin. He is presently working on a book called Climate Futures and the Just Transition.

White is on the editorial board of Design Philosophy Papers and has been a guest editor of Science as Culture and InTAR:Journal of Adaptive Reuse. He has lectured widely throughout North and South America, Europe and South East Asia. As Dean of Liberal Arts at RISD, he provides general oversight for the departments of History of Art + Visual Culture; History, Philosophy + the Social Sciences; and Literary Arts + Studies.