Peter DeBartolo

Visiting Scholar

Peter DeBartolo is a critical geographer whose interdisciplinary research interrogates the production of imaginative urban geographies, the spatialization of state power, and the interrelationships between racialized policing, surveillance, and security in contemporary cities. He is a doctoral candidate in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford and a Senior Adjunct Professor at Adelphi University, where his teaching engages global affairs, political economy, and social change. His dissertation examines New York City’s post-9/11 transformation through archival and documentary research, tracing how military urbanism, imperial power, and the logics of war have reshaped domestic urban governance, infrastructure, and everyday life. The project also foregrounds urban contestation and counter-geographies as sites of resistance and reimagination that open possibilities for decolonized and emancipatory urban futures. Peter connects his scholarship to praxis through collaborations with community organizations working toward just, inclusive, and equitable cities. He participates in the Surveillance Studies Network, the Race & Resistance Research Hub at Oxford, and the Royal Geographical Society’s Carceral Geography Working Group. He earned an MA in Political Science and Social & Political Theory from Central European University and a BA in Political Studies and Global & International Studies from Bard College.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.