Professor of Human Geography
Veronika Cummings is a human geographer with a focus onsocial geographic urbanity and globalization research. Prior to her offer of appointment as Professor of Human Geography (2017) at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore (2015-2017) and Assistant Professor (2013-2015) at the German University of Technology in Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman. Prior to this, she was a post-doctoral assistant in the Cultural Geography work group at RWTH Aachen University, where she has been working on transformation processes and transnational relations in the Sultanate of Oman since 2009, as well as on the migration regime in the Indian Ocean to the GCC states. She obtained a doctorate (Dr. phil.) from the School of Philosophy at the University of Passau in 2009 with a dissertation on the production of social and spatial inequality in the favelas of Salvador da Bahia (Brazil). She completed her Diplom program of study in Geography and Sociology at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg and the Université de Caen in France.
Her current thematic fields of research are 1) socio-political-spatial negotiations of power and belonging in the context of migration(nation-building; international labour migration/migration regimes and related globalized urban spaces), 2) sustainability utopias(visions of the future, urban transformations, perception and communication of utopia//dystopia, post-growth and resilience) with a view to social and climate-related transitions and 3) geographies of ethics with a view to the interplay of unbounded responsibility and understandings of values of geographical but also social resources and their public negotiation, especially in the field of tension between open-participatory and authoritarian societies. Her empirical research experience in this area spans more than 15 years in the Sultanate of Oman, the United Arab States, Singapore and Germany. Earlier regional research contexts were Brazil, Madagascar and Sri Lanka.
In terms of epistemology, her work is particularly oriented towards social theories, the philosophy of justice, approaches from the field of environmental humanities and praxeological theory. Empirically, she works primarily with social science and ethnographic (multi-sited, narrative and visual) methods within the framework of qualitative social research.
Leibniz Science Campus: “Resiliencies: Comparing and Integrating Methodologies, Methods, Narratives, and Theories (RECOMENT)”, University Mainz/ LEIZA & University Trier
Research Group Indian Ocean Confluences
Consultation hours:
By appointment by e-mail
