Maria Rusca

Short presentation

I am a human-environment geographer working at the intersections of urban and environmental change. My research is driven by a commitment to expose and challenge the political and economic systems that produce social inequalities and drive contemporary environmental crises, while proliferating possibilities for more just socio-environmental futures. Grounded in political ecology and feminist perspectives, I use water as a powerful lens for tracing relations of power, capitalism and colonialism.

Keywords

• Political ecology · Water justice · Environmental politics · Climate storylines · Experimental political ecology · Interdisciplinarity · Epistemic justice

Biography

I have had the opportunity to work in several academic environments across Europe, each with different intellectual traditions, working cultures, colleagues and student communities. Before joining Uppsala University, I worked at the University of Manchester, King’s College London and UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, as well as previously in Uppsala’s Department of Earth Sciences. These experiences, and collaborations with researchers across human geography, development studies, hydrology and climate science, continue to shape how I approach research, teaching and academic collaboration.

Previous positions

2021–2025 | University of Manchester, UK Professor in Water Politics and Development (2025); Senior Lecturer in Global Development (2022–2024); Lecturer in Global Development (2021–2022), Global Development Institute.

2019–2021 | Uppsala University, Sweden Senior Research Fellow, Department of Earth Sciences.

2015–2018 | King’s College London, UK Lecturer in Water and Development (2017–2018); Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow (2015–2017), Department of Human Geography.

2010–2015 | UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands Senior Lecturer in Water Governance (2013–2015); Lecturer in Water Governance (2010–2012).

Research

My research asks how socio-nvironmental inequalities are historically produced, sustained and contested, and what possibilities exist for transforming them. Grounded in political ecology and feminist perspectives, my work seeks to expose and challenge the political, cultural and economic systems that drive contemporary environmental crises and contribute to the current impasse in addressing them. Water has provided a particularly powerful lens for this work, as one of the principal media through which power relations are organised, reproduced and contested.

My research seeks to proliferate possibilities by challenging the apparent inevitability of dominant economic arrangements and tracing the historical relations of capitalism and colonialism through which contemporary inequalities have been produced. I therefore foreground contestation, possibility and transformation alongside critique, asking how political ecology, and the critical project more broadly, can engage more seriously with transformation and alternative futures. Through experimental, speculative and future-oriented political ecologies, drawing particularly on feminist perspectives, I explore how different futures can be imagined, whose futures become possible, and how more just socio-environmental relations might be enacted.

I see interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration as integral to this transformative academic project. Much of my research therefore develops through collaborations with researchers, communities, citizen-led organisations and other actors working to understand and transform socio-environmental relations. These collaborations require careful and reflexive attention to the relationships through which knowledge is produced. Drawing particularly on feminist and decolonial scholarship, I seek to build research partnerships based on relation-making across differences, attentiveness and responsiveness to evolving relations and possibilities, and a commitment to epistemic justice. These concerns also inform my research on whose knowledge counts in understanding environmental change, how inequalities are reproduced through research and knowledge practices, and how different ways of knowing water and climate can be brought into dialogue without erasing their differences.

My research therefore meanders across disciplinary and methodological boundaries where doing so helps address these questions. I have developed approaches that bring critical geography into dialogue with hydrology and climate science, alongside historical, ethnographic, participatory and creative visual research. Documentary filmmaking has been a longstanding part of this practice, both as a research method and as a means of collaborative knowledge production and engagement.

Media

Research I have led and contributed to has received international media coverage, including in The Guardian, BBC Radio, CNN, Politico and La Repubblica, as well as Sky News Italia and RAI.

Documentary filmmaking

Documentary filmmaking has been part of my research practice for many years. I use film both as a research method and as a way of bringing research into dialogue with communities, practitioners and wider publics. My documentaries explore water inequalities, everyday experiences of water and environmental change, and have been screened in research, policy, community and educational settings.

Water at the Margins (2019) — Director, IHE Delft/King’s College London with Whales that Fly. Selected for the 2019 Crosscuts Film Festival, Stockholm.

Lilongwe Water Works? (2017) — Director, King’s College London with Whales that Fly.

Tonlè Sap: The Heart of Cambodia (2009) — Director, Roma Capitale Mondiale per l’Acqua.

Community Participation in Water Provision in Kompong Thom City (2009) — Director, Roma Capitale Mondiale per l’Acqua.