Rate My Professor Laura Schoenberger,

Dr Laura Schoenberger is an Assistant Professor (Research) in the Department of Geography at Durham University, where she holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for her project "Digging into sand: New territories in the making," which investigates sand extraction and territorialization processes. Her research specializes in political ecology and political geography, focusing on resource conflicts, territory, land rights, and sand politics, primarily in Southeast Asia with emphasis on Cambodia. She is affiliated with the Politics-State-Space research cluster. Schoenberger completed her PhD in Critical Human Geography at York University in 2018, followed by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Ottawa on "Sand grabbing: Disentangling land, water and sand to reveal new struggles for territory." She brings over 15 years of experience as a researcher and development practitioner in the region, including roles with the UN, environmental NGOs, and funders in Cambodia, Vietnam, Lao PDR, and Singapore.

Schoenberger has published extensively on agrarian and environmental transformations. She co-edited De-centring Land Grabbing: Southeast Asia Perspectives on Agrarian-Environmental Transformations (Routledge, 2018). Selected publications include "“They Turn Us into Criminals”: Embodiments of Fear in Cambodian Land Grabbing” (Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018, with Alice Beban), “Fieldwork Undone: Knowing Cambodia's Land Grab Through Affective Encounters” (ACME, 2019, with Alice Beban), “Concessions in Cambodia: Governing Profits, Extending State Power and Enclosing Resources from the Colonial Era to the Present” (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016, with Jean-Christophe Diepart), “Street Vendor Livelihoods and Everyday Politics in Hanoi, Vietnam: The Seeds of a Diverse Economy?” (Urban Studies, 2012, with Sarah Turner), and “Negotiating Remote Borderland Access: Small-Scale Trade on the Vietnam–China Border” (Development and Change, 2008, with Sarah Turner). Her work appears in leading journals such as Journal of Peasant Studies, Critical Asian Studies, and Development and Change. Recognized with the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Banting Fellowship, Schoenberger continues to advance scholarship on social and environmental justice.