Dr Benjamin Neimark

Profile

Benjamin Neimark is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, and a Fellow at the Institute of Social Science and Humanities (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. Benjamin is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of biological conservation and resource extraction, high-value commodity chains, ‘green’ precarious smallholder production, and agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. His current research looks at the US military as a global climate actor and, more broadly, the environment footprints of the world’s militaries.

Teaching

Postgraduate

• BUSM091 – Global Supply Chain Management

Ben is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).

Research

Research Interests:

Benjamin is passionate about exploring pathways for just socio-economic, political and ecological futures in the Global South. His work focuses on the uneven development of precarious labour in the green, blue and bio-economy. He is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of labour, biological conservation and resource extraction (bio-/green economy), high-value commodity chains, smallholder production, agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar.

Centre and Group Membership

• Member of Centre for Labour and Global Production

Publications

Amuzu, D., Neimark, B., & Kull, C. (2022). Bittersweet cocoa: Certification programmes in Ghana as battlegrounds for power, authority and legitimacy. Geoforum, 136, 54-67.

Neimark, B., Osterhoudt, S., Blum, L., & Healy, T. (2021). Mob justice and ‘The civilized commodity’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 48(4), 734-753.

Atkins, E., Follis, L., Neimark, B. D., & Thomas, V. (2021). Uneven development, crypto-regionalism, and the (un-) tethering of nature in Quebec. Geoforum, 122, 63-73.

Neimark, B., Mahanty, S., Dressler, W., & Hicks, C. (2020). Not just participation: the rise of the eco‐precariat in the green economy. Antipode, 52(2), 496-521.

Neimark, B. (2019). Address the roots of environmental crime. Science, 364(6436), 139-139.

Neimark, B., Osterhoudt, S., Alter, H., & Gradinar, A. (2019). A new sustainability model for measuring changes in power and access in global commodity chains: through a smallholder lens. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-11.

Neimark, B., Childs, J., Nightingale, A. J., Cavanagh, C. J., Sullivan, S., Benjaminsen, T. A., ... & Harcourt, W. (2019). Speaking power to “post-truth”: Critical political ecology and the new authoritarianism. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 613-623.

Public Engagement

Benjamin is a lead-initiator of global political ecology network POLLEN, and Editor-in-Chief at the African Geographical Review. He has a PhD from Rutgers University and a masters from Cornell University, USA.

Principle Investigator of the UKRI-ESRC funded Concrete Impacts Project.