Rate My Professor Laura Schoenberger,

Dr. Laura Schoenberger is an Assistant Professor (Research) and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Geography at Durham University. She earned her PhD in Critical Human Geography from York University in 2018. Prior to her current position, she held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Ottawa, focusing on the project “Sand grabbing: Disentangling land, water and sand to reveal new struggles for territory.” Schoenberger brings over 15 years of experience as a researcher and development practitioner in Southeast Asia, having worked with the United Nations, environmental non-governmental organizations, and research funders in Cambodia, Vietnam, Lao PDR, and Singapore. Her career trajectory reflects a deep commitment to understanding resource governance and social justice issues in the region.

Schoenberger's research centers on political ecology and political geography, with particular emphasis on resource conflicts, territory and territorialization, land rights, sand extraction, and dynamics in Southeast Asia. She contributes to the Politics-State-Space research cluster at Durham University. Her influential publications appear in premier journals such as the Journal of Peasant Studies, Urban Studies, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Development and Change, and Critical Asian Studies. Key works include “What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia?” (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2017), “Street vendor livelihoods and everyday politics in Hanoi, Vietnam: the seeds of a diverse economy?” (Urban Studies, 2012), “They Turn Us into Criminals: Embodiments of Fear in Cambodian Land Grabbing” (Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018), “Negotiating remote borderland access: Small-scale trade on the Vietnam–China Border” (Development and Change, 2008), and “Gendered eviction, protest and recovery: a feminist political ecology engagement with land grabbing in rural Cambodia” (2019). She co-edited the volume De-centring Land Grabbing: Southeast Asia Perspectives on Agrarian-Environmental Transformations (Routledge, 2018, with Peter Vandergeest), advancing scholarship on agrarian transformations, environmental justice, and authoritarian politics in Cambodia.