Academic Career
- 2024-present: Lecturer in Human Geography, Loughborough University
- 2022-2024: Research Fellow, Centro de Estudios Demográficos, Urbanos y Ambientales (CEDUA), Colegio de México
- 2018-2024: PhD, City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley
Selected Professional Responsibilities
- 2024-present: Ethics Officer, Loughborough Geography
- 2024-present: Co-organizer, Loughborough Geography Seminar Series
- 2024-present: Board Member, Economic Geography Specialty Group, AAG
- 2024-present: Co-organizer, Women in Economic Geography Social Hour, RGS-IBG
- 2023: Board Member, Socialist & Critical Geography Specialty Group, AAG
Dr. Beki McElvain is an urban and economic geographer working at the intersection of climate and disaster risk, social studies of finance, and critical perspectives on development. Her research on climate economies, which builds on her doctoral work in Mexico City, now extends to a relational agenda connecting sites across ‘Southern’ urban contexts from Mexico to the UK. Drawing on synthesised political economy, critical planning, and STS approaches, her work investigates the prevalence of market-oriented insurance instruments for disaster recovery, new forms of resistance shaped by the financialization of risk, and efforts to ‘innovate’ urban climate adaptation within a global system of private capital.
Beki’s doctoral research consisted of a three-year extended ethnography of how Mexico’s shifting state relationships with development finance institutions shape disaster governance and climate risk. Supported by competitive grants from the US Department of Education (USDE-FLAS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF-INFEWS) through a Blum Centre for Developing Economies fellowship, this research investigated the displacement of sovereign disaster governance to global capital markets through catastrophe bonds and state political-economic processes underpinned by austerity.
This past work provides the foundation for current projects that expand on these themes to investigate new urban contexts, generating critical insights on how cities integrate or resist market-oriented climate finance. This trajectory now structures a relational research agenda, connecting the precarious urban peripheries of Mexico with the engineered landscapes of the UK to examine how life is made possible through emergent practices in spaces of vital knowledge production, profound precarity, and extraction.
Beki is dedicated to research-led teaching across economic, political, urban, and development geography, focusing on political economy as it pertains to climate and disaster governance, insurance, risk and recovery.
Beki is always open to talking with potential scholars who share similar research interests, and is currently accepting PhD students.
- McElvain B. and De Coss, Corzo, A. (2025) “Rethinking the urban South? Centring ‘unprecedented’ risk and repair.” Urban Geography. doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2561962
- McElvain, B. (2024) “Fixing” finance? The dialectical publics of resilient disaster governance in Mexico City.” Urban Geography, 45:5, 776-797, doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2023.2234780
- McElvain, B. (2023) “Autorecovery and everyday disaster in Mexico City’s peripheries.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 41(2), 253–274. doi.org/10.1177/02637758231161613
- Knuth, S., Cox, S., Savareh, S., Taylor, Z., Morris, J., and McElvain, B. (2023) “Interrupted Rhythms and Uncertain Futures: Mortgage Finance and the (Spatio-) Temporalities of Climate Breakdown.” Journal of Urban Affairs. doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2023.2229462
- Moreno Carranco, M. and McElvain, B. (2020) “Life Above, Rubble Below: A Case of Historically Produced Risk & Perception in Mexico City.” Ardeth 6: Contingency. doi.org/10.17454/Ardeth06.12
- Nikolaou, S., Diaz-Fanas, G., Garini, E., & McElvain, B. (2019). “Dried Lakes Do Tell Tales: Seismic Soil Amplification in Mexico City.” Geo-Strata. Geo Institute of ASCE, 23(2), 40-46. https://doi.org/10.1061/geosek.0000131