Beki L. McElvain, PhD

Selected publications

Rethinking the urban South? Centering “unprecedented” risk and repair, Urban Geography, with Alejandro de Coss-Corzo, 2025.

“Fixing” finance? The dialectical publics of resilient disaster governance in Mexico City, Urban Geography, 2024.

Autorecovery and everyday disaster in Mexico City’s peripheries, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2023. 

Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures: Mortgage finance and the (spatio-)temporalities of climate breakdown, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2023.

Life above, rubble below: A case of historically produced risk & perception in Mexico City, Ardeth 6: Contingency, 2020.

Selected other writing

Trying to reason with hurricane season: Death drive in Florida, The Break-Down, 2025.

The politics of force: Militarized care and disaster recovery in Acapulco, Turning Point Magazine, 2024.

Development, debt, and disaster risk in ‘nature’s casino’, Climate and Community Institute, 2024.

Bouncing forward from disasters on Hawaii’s Big Island: Lessons for equitable recovery and future resilience, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 2022.

About

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Human Geography at Loughborough University, where I work and teach at the intersection of climate and disaster risk, social studies of finance, and critical perspectives on development. Through this lens, I investigate the everyday practices and vital forms of knowledge that make life possible in spaces marked by extraction and profound precarity. >>>