Kendra Kintzi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Trained as a political ecologist and digital media scholar, her work focuses on questions of decarbonization, digitalization, and development. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Development Sociology from Cornell University and her B.A. in Development Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Rooted in infrastructure studies, geographical political economy, and post-colonial approaches, her research examines how energy infrastructures and environmental media are changing landscapes and livelihoods in Southwest Asia. Her work highlights how the architectures of global climate change mitigation are mediated through uneven urban environments, and how evolving practices of social mobilization reveal alternative visions of collective climate futures. Kendra’s work on decarbonization has been published in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Sustainability Science, Antipode, and Commodity Frontiers. Her work on digital media and smart development has been published in The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Big Data and Society, Geography Directions, and New Mandala. She has also contributed to four edited volumes on gender, climate politics, smart infrastructure, and political geography.
Prior to joining NYU, Kendra was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by the Society of Woman Geographers, Fulbright, CAORC, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and she is the recipient of a Digital Geography Student Paper Award from the American Association of Geographers, an AAG Middle States Student Paper Award, and a Cornell Graduate Racial Justice Fellowship. She also brings over a decade of experience in international development to her scholarship, and continues to contribute to action research and public dialogue around issues of gender, education, and global development.