Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor
The Waste Commons
Rosalind Fredericks’s research and teaching interests are centered on development, urbanism, and political ecology in Africa. As an urban geographer, her research brings together discard studies, critical infrastructure studies, and feminist political ecology in examining the politics of waste work and discard infrastructures in Dakar, Senegal. Her book, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018), was awarded the Toyin Falola Book Award for the best book in African Studies by the Association of Global South Studies. Her current research project, supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation, examines the lifeworlds that hang in the balance with the transformation of Dakar’s dump, Mbeubeuss. With funding from a Green Grant from the NYU Office of Sustainability and the NGO WIEGO, she is producing a documentary film, The Waste Commons, in collaboration with Alchemy Films about the politics of waste picking in Dakar. Fredericks’s research has won major funding support from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, and the National Science Foundation, and she was NYU’s Stephen Charney Vladeck Junior Faculty Fellow for 2015-2016. After completing her PhD in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Fredericks was a postdoctoral research scholar with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. At Columbia, she taught with the Institute for African Studies and organized The World and Africa event series for the Committee on Global Thought. Fredericks has edited two books with Mamadou Diouf on citizenship in African cities: Les arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal: Espaces contestés et civilités urbaines (Editions Karthala, 2013) and The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) and is currently editing New Frontiers in Discard Studies with Mohammed Rafi Arefin and Robin Nagle. Fredericks is the co-director (with Robin Nagle) of the Discard Studies Collaborative at NYU and co-organizer of the Discard Studies Conference held at Gallatin in September 2022 and the Discard Studies Film Festival in April 2024.