about

I am an Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. I received a Ph.D. in City Planning from UC Berkeley in 2015 with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies.

I use ethnographic and mobile methods to study how people make and produce alternative urban mobilities in an era of compounding environmental and democratic crises. I am currently drafting a book manuscript provisionally entitled “Immobile City: Stuck Between Care and Fear in Quito, Ecuador” where I explore the central role that urban mobility plays in caring and providing protection in the urban life. I illustrate how citizen-led mobility solutions deviate and work around an uncertain transit landscape. Citizens, cities and the state co-manage and co-create a city in the name of care and compassion, that results in being stuck waiting for change in a fearful metropolis.

I think a lot about bus riding, public space, the public life of cities, local democratic experimentation, urban cycling, mobile methods, gendered activism, urban infrastructures, climate justice, and experimental and shared economies. I use Feminist STS approaches to build experiments in urban space in order to reveal previously unseen and often neglected subjects and objects of research. 

Join Latin American Cities Working group, a collaborative research network, if you want to connect with other urbanists enthusiastic about Latin American Cities. Email me to join our google listserv  or jcgamble at gmail dot com.