Mia Bennett is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working under the supervision of Dr. John Agnew and Dr. Laurence Smith with the support of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Charles F. Scott Fellowship.
Her dissertation examines transportation infrastructure and natural resource development in the post-Cold War Arctic. She researches how contemporary development of northern resource frontiers is both proceeding and being imagined at a variety of scales. At the local scale, her work relies on methods from political geography, including fieldwork and policy analysis, in order to compare two infrastructure development projects: one in Yakutsk, Russia and one in the Northwest Territories, Canada.
At the regional scale, she uses night-lights data as a proxy for socioeconomic development in Russia and China. The wide scope of her project has also led her to study topics such as Singapore’s activities in the Arctic, the differences in maps produced by the Canadian government and the country’s largest Inuit organization, and the Chinese and Russian Olympic torch relays.
Mia's research is supported by additional generous grants from the International Council for Canadian Studies, the UCLA College of Social Sciences, the American Geophysical Union’s Cryosphere Focus Group, the UCLA Canadian Studies Program, and the UCLA Urban Humanities Institute. For her research in Yakutsk, she is also collaborating with the Configurations of Remoteness (CORE) project based at the University of Vienna.
Mia received her MPhil with Distinction in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute, where she was a Gates Scholar. Her master's dissertation, carried out under the supervision of Dr. Michael Bravo, investigated the extent of an Asian-Arctic region, focusing on the activities of South Korea, China, and Japan in the circumpolar north.
Mia's freelance work and maps have appeared in ReNew Canada, Water Canada, FACTA, and Baltic Rim Economies, among other publications. She speak French, Swedish, and Russian. Her academic publications are available on academia.edu and ResearchGate.
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Twitter: @miageografia