Stephanie Wakefield

Postdoctoral Associate

Sea Level Solutions Center


Office: SIPA 316A

Phone: 305-348-2247

Email: swakefie@fiu.edu

Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer and Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow at Florida International University in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies. Her work, developed over the past decade of teaching and research in New York City, explores the diverse practices and technologies of resilient urbanism as both technical phenomenon and catalysts of new kinds of life in the Anthropocene. She is currently finalizing a book, Living in the Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space, exploring the transformative possibilities offered by the 'back loop' and urban experimentation as a mode of dwelling within it. She is also working on a second research project titled Miami Forever: Urbanism in the Back Loop, investigating experimental practices for living with water in Miami, Florida and through this the potential emergence of a new paradigm of 'back loop urbanism.' She publishes her work in academic journals including Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Geography Compass, and in popular and artistic venues such as Brooklyn Rail, Miami New Times, and May. Before relocating to Miami, she taught Urban Studies and Environmental Studies as Visiting Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School and Instructor at Queens College, and was the founder of a neighborhood resilience hub located in Queens which offered a regional farm share, skills workshops, and resiliency trainings. Her teaching and research are intertwined, and she aims to make her work useful to broad audiences in diverse formats. She is beginning a multimedia social media channel and website, Back Loop TV, featuring short videos and interviews with resilience practitioners, highlighting particular projects and replicable, locally adaptable tools with additional 'how-to' videos. In the face of apocalyptic visions of climate change, across her work Wakefield aims to contribute to a growing body of practices, designs, and forms of urban life that can help ordinary people live in and beyond the Anthropocene.