• Uneven Devleopment
• Relational Comparison
• Fashion Production and Consumption
• Non-Human Urban Natures

As a committed Geographer I use field research to understand pressing social challenges and work within Geography as an integrative discipline to understand complex issues from different branches of the subject. I have published in sub-disciplinary areas including cultural, development, economic, environmental, political, and urban geography. Additionally I have written three successful and widely read books that draw ideas to make a leading integrated contribution to geography as a whole. Thematically my work has been focused in 4 significant areas that fit within the King’s Geography Contested Development and Urban Futures research groups:

Uneven Development in Africa

Across a series of funded research interventions, I have undertaken fieldwork in Southern and West Africa on emerging economic and political processes that are challenging – and changing – the role of western donors in Africa. This has included publications that critique the narratives of ‘Africa Rising’ and ‘Chinese neocolonialism’, as well as field research on anti-government protest, corruption, international volunteering, responses to the Ebola pandemic, and the exploitation of natural resources. These critical studies were drawn together in my second monograph: The End of Development.

Relational Comparison

My most important theoretical contributions to geography uses the Relational Comparison framework. This Marxist approach builds an understanding of the combined development of rich and poor regions. It dismantles ahistorical comparisons and positions the development trajectories of individual places within an interconnected understanding of the world economy. My contributions have included an article on the UK’s role in Sierra Leone and work on debt in Africa comparing the crisis of the 1980s to rising indebtedness today. Recently I have focouesed on exploring comparisons between Apartheid-era South African and Israel and Palestine. This important work spanning development, economic and political geography came together in my latest monograph: Bullsh*t Comparisons.

Fashion Production and Consumption

My research on clothing industries and the fashion sector advances insights into the global connections between geographies of production and consumption. On a theoretical level, I have successfully brought the systems of provision approach from political economy into geography and helped explain how ‘fast fashion’ impacts livelihoods in Asia. In early work I did case studies examining flows of second-hand clothes from the Global North to the South, labour, retail, and the environment. These strands of different geographical research came together in Clothing Poverty a monograph celebrated as ‘important’ (Daily Telegraph) and ‘Revealing’ (Independent).

Non-Human Urban Natures.

I have worked to understand the agency of animals in gentrification through a review article and case studies of oysters in the UK  and sardines in Lisbon. I have also interrogated the relationships between synthetic and natural materials leading to articles on artificial lawns , cork agriculture in Portugal and new avocado varieties in Colombia.

Dr Andrew Brooks is the Deputy Head of Deparmtnet and a Reader in Uneven Development. His whole teaching career has been based at kIngs and he joined the Department as a Lecturer in Development Geography in 2011. Andrew had been an undergraduate at King's and received a First Class BA degree as well as the Departmental Prize in Geography. He later worked for VSO for two years (2005-2006) as a social researcher in Papua New Guinea and on programme development in the UK. In 2007 he was awarded an ESRC 1+3  fully funded MSc and PhD studentship at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.