Dr Lisa Tilley

Dr Lisa Tilley is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London.

Lisa Tilley joined the SOAS community in September 2021 after holding previous positions at Warwick, QMUL and Birkbeck. At present, Lisa is working on the extraction and processing of nickel for the electrification of vehicle markets, with a particular focus on the sacrificial socioecologies these processes produce. She is also finishing a book on Liberation Ecology for Pluto Press.   

Lisa’s wider research is mainly anchored in critical approaches to political ecology and political economy with particular attention to structures of race, gender, and class. Her published work often draws on various theoretical approaches to ‘the colonial question’ in material analyses of socioecological harm and expropriation with a special focus on frontiers of capital in Indonesia. 

She has analysed key sites of colonial/capitalist expansion – the plantation, the mine, the smelter, and the city – adding detail to our knowledge of social and ecological formations, technologies, and logics produced through those locations. Lisa’s work has appeared in New Political Economy, Sociology, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Antipode, Review of International Political Economy, Politics, and History of the Present among other journals and edited collections. She has also co-edited five journal special issues and one book to date on themes including race in political economy and ecology.

Lisa served as Chair (2022-2023) of the Global Development Studies (GDS) Section of the ISA; co-convenor of Political Economy Beyond Boundaries, a standing section of the EISA; and co-convenor of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association (CPD-BISA, 2016-2021). She currently coordinates the newly established London Political Ecology Collective. 

Socioecological harm; Political Ecology; Political Economy; Resource Frontiers; Plantations; Nickel; ‘Critical’ Minerals; Race, Gender, & Class;  Population;  Extractivism; Indonesia & Southeast Asia.