Randi Irwin

Dr Randi Irwin received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology in May 2019 from The New School for Social Research in New York. She is an environmental and legal anthropologist working with the Sahrawi refugee community in North Africa and she draws on this research to inform her teaching in anthropology, social change, and development at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

At its core, her research attends to the intersections of resource extraction, land rights, and the intersections of protest and law. Her primary research, which was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), was conducted with Sahrawi refugees and the Sahrawi state-in-exile. This work has focused on Sahrawi-led political and legal challenges to natural resource exploitation in Western Sahara as part of a broader strategy to bring about the territory's decolonisation as it remains the last colony in Africa. Her research is the first to focus on Sahrawi-led natural resource contracts as a mode of projecting a future, decolonised Western Sahara and puts forth a research practice focused on economic strategies that build a near-future with different territorial and political configurations.