Staff profile

I am an economic and political geographer interested in questions around conflict, displacement, other forms of mobility and urbanization. I am particularly interested in the dynamic social assemblages that coalesce in times of uncertainty and flux, whether due to economic crisis, ongoing conflict, or the arrival of vast aid infrastructures after socio/natural disasters. In my scholarship, I draw on feminist, decolonial and critical readings of political economy to understand the conditions of produced hyper-precarity that shape livelihood and mobility strategies across much of Africa, and more broadly the developing world. I am deeply interested in the intersections between urbanization (and ideas around urban futures) and the viability of agricultural and pastoral lifeways. Methodologically, I value long-term ethnographic engagement, accountability, and co-production of knowledge.

Recently, I’ve been working across borders and disciplinary boundaries to build equitable research partnerships with Likikiri Collective and researchers in South Sudan in support of projects exploring work and livelihoods, care and obligation, crisis response, generational change, displacement and climate impacts through arts-based participatory methods.

Past work has considered the political economies of refugee return migration to South Sudan (2009-2011) by exploring the relationship between migration, resource claims and livelihood practices in a small rural town. A related project examined the job-seeking strategies and political subjectivities of the many young returnees looking for work in rapidly urbanizing South Sudan (2011). More recently, I’ve explored to the ways in which large-scale humanitarian and state-building interventions reshape regional migration patterns, economies and social relations in urban centres in East Africa. At Durham, I continue to work on themes related to political and economic crises, conflict, humanitarian economies and the social infrastructures of care and distribution that’s people rely on in times of acute stress.

Supervision

I have a developing supervisory profile in supporting research on disasters and displacement in our climate changed world. That said, I welcome doctoral research students interested in those themes as well as in topics related to urban Africa; humanitarianism and mutual aid; refugees and displacement; land and resource rights; and more generally the socialities that underpin economies.

I'm keen to support research focused on the Sudans, the Horn, and the Sahel. I particularly welcome students from these regions, those with non-traditional pathways into academia, and/or those who have experienced displacement. 

Current students:

Belen Desmaison Estrada

Belen Desmaison holds a B.A. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development from University College London. She is a researcher and lecturer at the Pontifical Catholic University in Peru. Belen has led action-research projects in Latin America and the Caribbean focusing on inequalities, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and infrastructures of care. Her PhD research develops a creative portfolio using arts-based research and architectural ethnography to explore understandings of ‘home’ and ‘sense of place’ in a flooding community undergoing state-led resettlement in Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon.

Tilly Hall

Tilly Hall is a ESRC NINE-DTP researcher in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research looks to explore forms of care, wildfire risk management and climate change in Sonoma County, California. Prior to her PhD research, Tilly’s work focused on the disaster experience of people imprisoned in England and Wales’ prison estate and people experiencing homelessness in Cardiff. She is interested in the seemingly small, everyday moments of disaster risk management and how these come to matter. Away from academia, Tilly is a keen runner and swimmer.  

• Conflict and post-conflict recovery; humanitarianism and humanitarian economies; migration and displacement; mutual aid and care; work and livelihoods; uncertainty; Sudan, South Sudan, East Africa, the Horn, and the Sahel.

Journal Article

• Newhouse, L. S. (2024). Creative fictions: Incentive work and humanitarian labour in South Sudan. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Article e12682. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12682
• Newhouse, L. (2021). On not seeking asylum: migrant masculinities and the politics of refusal. Geoforum, 120, 176-185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.01.024
• Newhouse, L. S. (2018). Other Paths, Other Destinations: Towards a Manifold Reading of Mobility across Borders. Movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 4(1/2018), 83-100
• Newhouse, L. (2017). Uncertain futures and everyday hedging in a humanitarian city. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(4), 503-515. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12188
• Newhouse, L. S. (2017). Assembling land control after displacement: some reflections from rural Southern Sudan. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(5), 1000-1021. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1191472
• Newhouse, L. S. (2015). More than mere survival: violence, humanitarian governance, and practical material politics in a Kenyan refugee camp. Environment and Planning A, 47(11), 2292-2307. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140106p
• Lopez, P. J., Bhungalia, L., & Newhouse, L. S. (2015). Geographies of humanitarian violence. Environment and Planning A, 47(11), 2232 - 2239. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x15613330
• Newhouse, L. S. (2012). Footing it, or why I walk. African Geographical Review, 31(1), 67-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376812.2012.679461

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Newhouse, L. The Corridor: How the East African corridor spanning the Indian Ocean from Somalia to South Africa is being radically reshaped

Working Paper

• Newhouse, L. Urban attractions: returnee youth, mobility and the search for a future in South Sudan's regional towns