Alex G. Papadopoulos

​As an urban and political geographer, Alex's scholarship is informed by critical, comparative, and applied approaches to urban geography and planning, geopolitics, heritage/legacy built environments, and geographies of sexual difference. In this work, the changing character of state power speaks to the regulation and transformation of urban space, the political-spatial organization of cities, the construction of urban-ethnic identities, and the framing of privacy in cities in the context of contested performances of sexual difference. His research has explored as diverse topics as Greek statecraft's entanglements with the geopolitics of difference, urban cultures of resistance and exclusion in post-Tanzimat Istanbul, the emergence of “global" Brussels in the age of European integration, the resuscitation of commercial spaces in post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, the geographies of same-sex desire in modern Athens, and more recently, the ethical calculus of smart urbanism. The connective tissue and theoretical affinities of these very different scholarly endeavors are an abiding concern over the urban-spatial implications of state power.