I am an anthropologist and lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I hold a PhD in anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill and MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. My research work focuses the politics of land and water in contexts of urban real estate expansion. I study this topic through three lines of inquiry:
(1) Speculative urbanism: how real estate speculation reconfigures socio-spatial relations in peri-urban and rural environments.
(2) Resource grabbing: the institutional arrangements that facilitate the transfer and concentration of land and water rights among rentier actors.
(3) Elites and authoritarianism: how real estate practices are incorporated into regional processes of class and state formation.
My work has been published in academic journals such as Antipode, City & Society, and The Journal of Peasant Studies. There I have written on topics like land and water grabbing, financialization, elites, and authoritarian populism. I have also written for Central American newspapers, such as El Faro, MalaYerba and Focos.
Email: jcg2653@live.unc.edu
