DrRiki Scanlan

Dr Riki Scanlan is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Geosciences.

Riki is working on a Discovery Project (Wiring Australian Cities), led by Professor Kurt Iveson and Associate Professor Marilu Melo Zurita, which examines the ways in which Australian cities were wired and rewired for telecommunications connectivity, from the colonial telegraph to contemporary data centres. They're particularly engaged in understanding how data centres and AI are provoking urban transformation today and how this ongoing process mirrors past contestations over the spaces of telecommunications. 

This project connects to Riki's wider research interests in the spatial political economy of racial capitalism and settler-colonialism, where they have active research pipelines relating to the geographies of dispossession in Australia and internationally. These are especially urgent questions in the context of movements towards decolonisation – in substance, not just symbols – and the pressing challenges today of political economic justice for all. 

Riki completed their PhD thesis in December 2023, on "Settler Space: a spatial history of nineteenth century Sydney", which blended together political economy, geography, and archival research in order to understand how settler-colonial dispossession shaped urban spaces and how the urban production of space reshaped dispossession. They have previously been a casual academic for long, long stints; gotten stranded in South Africa during COVID for a "short" research trip (fourteen months); and has recently picked up trail running.