Karen Paiva Henrique is a tenured Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is an urban and feminist political ecologist and critical urban scholar with a multidisciplinary training in geography, planning, and design. She is broadly interested in the linkages between spatial and environmental planning, climate change adaptation, loss and damage, and multidimensional justice.

Karen’s research investigates how people make decisions to protect what they value in the places where they live, and how their converging priorities and disagreements can inform community deliberation and inclusive climate governance. Her work strives to give voice to historically marginalized groups and promote situated experiences and knowledges of climate change to reframe urban development paradigms and achieve climate justice.

Karen was born, raised, and trained as an architect and urbanist in Brazil (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul). She has obtained a postgraduate degree in urban studies from the Bauhaus Foundation (Germany), a master’s in architecture from the Pennsylvania State University (United States), and a doctorate in geography from the University of Western Australia. Between 2019-21, Karen was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Western Australia. She has joined the University of Amsterdam as Assistant Professor in 2021.

For over ten years, Karen’s research has focused on climate change adaptation in the context of asymmetrical power relations and informality. Her work has spanned continents, with particular attention to the everyday experiences of flooding and adaptation across multiple axes of social differentiation (incl. class, race, gender, and age). She has conducted extensive field-based research in Brazil and Australia; her current projects expand this geographical scope with cases in Latin America and Europe.    

Karen’s teaching focuses on human-environment relations, uneven urban development, and the climate crisis. She has supervised several students on topics related to climate action, environmental governance, loss and damage, and datafication. Justice is the common thread that ties these projects together.

Karen is an editorial board member for the journals Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Springer Nature Climate Action. She is co-director for the Centre for Sustainable Development Studies and co-convenor for the EADI Working group on Inclusive Development. She was also a contributing author for the IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15).

Main research interests:

• Urban climate adaptation, including policy development, everyday practices, and pluralistic approaches, and their un/just implications.
• Everyday limits to adaptation and situated losses and damages in the context of global climate change.
• Knowledge production and reproduction across the Global South and North, and efforts to disrupt, dislocate, and decenter global knowledge flows.
• Creative and visual methodologies for studying urban environmental and climate change.

Current projects and collaborations

1. Urban Blue Justice (with Jannes Willems and Hebe Verrest). We are developing comparative field-based research to understand how climate justice materializes in relation to urban blue spaces. The goal is to locate climate justice, conceptually and empirically, in the ordinary adaptation practices of those working and living at the margins of urban waters within and across the Global North and South.

2. Knowledge Exchanges in Times of Urban Crises: This project investigates strategies for linking experts and knowledges across disciplinary boundaries, geographies, and scales to exchange situated experiences of socionatural urban disasters, share lessons learned in moments of crisis and beyond, and provide potential entry points for tackling crisis management, preparation, and recovery.

3. Critical and Creative Methodologies for Studying Climate Change (with Aparna Parikh). We explore the potential of critical visual analysis, using street-level imagery and digital storytelling, to examine the broader justice implications of uneven urban development and socioenvironmental change in everyday spaces.

4. Storying Geography Collective (with Sarah Wright, Joseph Palis, Natalie Osborne, Fiona Miller, Uma Kothari, Phoebe Everingham, and Maria Borovnik). We are a group of geographers and development scholars who leverage storytelling as a tool to record and weave together individual and collective accounts of place, memory, loss, and hope.

Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters

2023

Henrique, K. P. (2023). Repositioning marginal spaces in climate adaptation: Periphery, power and possibility. In M. Armiero, E. Turhan, & S. Paolo De Rosa (Eds.), Urban Movements and Climate Change: Loss, Damage and Radical Adaptation (pp. 161–181). Amsterdam University Press. doi: 10.5117/9789463726665_ch08

Tschakert, P., Parsons, M., Atkins, E., Garcia, A., Godden, N., Gonda, N., Henrique, K. P., Sallu, S., Steen, K., & Ziervogel, G. (2023). Methodological lessons for negotiating power, political capabilities, and resilience in research on climate change responses. World Development, 167, 106247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106247

Wright, S., Palis, J., Osborne, N., Miller, F., Kothari, U., Henrique, K. P., Everingham, P., & Borovnik, M. (2023). Storying Pandemia Collectively: Sharing Plural Experiences of Interruption, Dislocation, Care, and Connection. GeoHumanities, 0(0), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2022.2147445

2022

Henrique, K. P., Tschakert, P., Bourgault du Coudray, C., Horwitz, P., Krueger, K. D. C., & Wheeler, A. J. (2022). Navigating loss and value trade-offs in a changing climate. Climate Risk Management, 35, 100405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2022.100405

Henrique, K. P., & Tschakert, P. (2022). Everyday limits to adaptation. Oxford Open Climate Change, 2(1), kgab013. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgab013

Garcia, A., Gonda, N., Atkins, E., Godden, N. J., Henrique, K. P., Parsons, M., Tschakert, P., & Ziervogel, G. (n.d.). Power in resilience and resilience’s power in climate change scholarship. WIREs Climate Change, n/a(n/a), e762. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.762

2021

Henrique, K. P., & Tschakert, P. (2021). Pathways to urban transformation: From dispossession to climate justice. Progress in Human Geography, 45(5), 1169–1191. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520962856

2019

Henrique, K. P., & Tschakert, P. (2019). Taming São Paulo’s floods: Dominant discourses, exclusionary practices, and the complicity of the media. Global Environmental Change, 58, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.101940

Henrique, K. P., & Tschakert, P. (2019). Contested grounds: Adaptation to flooding and the politics of (in)visibility in São Paulo’s eastern periphery. Geoforum, 104, 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.04.026

2018

Tschakert, P., Henrique, K. P., Bitmead, R., Dassu, F., Crowther, M., Yukhnevich, Z., Anderson, C., Roddy, A., Bye, V., Rawlinson, A., O’Hara, N., Mottershead, A., Obeng, J., & Gerard, K. (2018). Affective dimensions of teaching and doing development. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59(2), 186–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12187

2015

Henrique, K. P. (2015). (Re)Envisioning architecture and landscape architecture in the fluid terrains of flooding. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, International Journal of Architectural Theory, 20(34), 139–161.

2013

Henrique, K. P. (2013). Modernity and continuity: Alternatives to instant tradition in contemporary Brazilian architecture. Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, 3(4), 103–112. https://doi.org/10.18848/2154-8676/CGP/v03i04/53722

Scientific and technical reports

2018

[Contributing Author] Roy, J., Tschakert, P., Waisman, H. (2018). Chapter 5: Sustainable development, poverty eradication and reducing inequalities. In Global warming of 1.5°C (pp. 445–538). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

2016

Tschakert, P., Henrique, K. P., Pannell, D., Pandit, R., Prout-Quicke, S., Lawrence, C., Sabharwal, A., Kragt, M., Ellis, N., Godden, N., Alston, M., Pearlman, P., Elrick-Barr, C., Barnett, J., Woodward, A., Abu, M., Larbi, R. T., Sallu, S., Thew, H., … Kunamwene, I. N. (2016). White paper: Assessing non-market loss and damage in the context of climate change (p. 36). University of Western Australia (UWA) and Worldwide Universities Network (WUN).

2015

Tschakert, P., Smithwick, E., Bug, L., Singha, K., Amankwah, R., Ward, A., Parker, E., Oppong, J., Hausermann, H., Wu, J., Naithani, K., Ricciardi, V., Machado, M., & Henrique, K. P. (2015). reBUild a healthy environment: Research and education on Buruli Ulcer, inundations, and land disturbance. The Pennsylvania State University and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

2011

Turkienicz, B., Henrique, V. P., Henrique, K. P., Heller, D., Teixeira, R., & Lersh, R. (2011). Plano local de habitação de interesse social de Parobé, RS [Affordable housing Master Plan for Parobé, RS]. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

2010

Turkienicz, B., Henrique, V. P., Henrique, K. P., Heller, D., Bugs, G., Teixeira, R., & Lersh, R. (2010). Plano local de habitação de interesse social de Nova Santa Rita, RS [Affordable housing Master Plan for Nova Santa Rita, RS]. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Other publications

2022

Henrique, K. P., & Parikh, A. (2022). Unearthing the right to the city through digital visual methods. Urban Matters Journal, Dislocating Urban Studies. https://urbanmattersjournal.com/unearthing-the-right-to-the-city-through-digital-visual-methods/

2018

Henrique, K. P. (2018). Landscapes of dispossession – Examining adaptation and the persistent exclusion of the urban poor. Sydney Environment Institute Magazine, 1, 22–25. https://sei.sydney.edu.au/publications/environmental-justice-collection/

Henrique, K. P. (2018). Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Urban Policy and Research, 36(1), 115–117. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08111146.2017.1358795