Idalina BaptistaView profile
Associate Professor
Dr. Idalina Baptista serves as Associate Professor in Urban Anthropology at the University of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education, where she teaches urban theory in the MSc and DPhil in Sustainable Urban Development programs. A Fellow of Kellogg College and member of the Oxford Network for the Future of Cities, she bridges academic research with real-world urban challenges through her extensive fieldwork in African cities. Her academic credentials include a PhD in City and Regional Planning (2009) and Master of Landscape Architecture (1999) from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BEng in Environmental Engineering (1996) from Portugal's New University of Lisbon. This interdisciplinary foundation informs her critical approach to urban development. Baptista's research pioneers decolonial perspectives on African urbanization, focusing on energy infrastructure governance in Maputo, Mozambique. She examines how prepayment electricity systems reshape social relations, how colonial legacies influence contemporary urban landscapes, and how community energy initiatives can advance energy justice. Her work challenges Anglo-American urban models through ethnographic and archival methodologies, emphasizing localized knowledge production for sustainable urban futures. Analysis of her 2018-2024 publications reveals consistent thematic focus on energy access inequalities, infrastructure informality, and post-colonial governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Her articles demonstrate methodological innovation through socio-technical analysis of electricity practices, contributing significantly to debates on urban political ecology and energy transitions in the Global South. She actively supervises doctoral candidates including Yaseen Albarim and Patrick Brown, while leading major research initiatives such as the Electric Urbanism project on prepayment systems in Mozambique, the CESET project on community energy across Ethiopia/Malawi/Mozambique, and a British Academy-funded study on energy access in conflict-affected urban areas. Her past experience as an environmental planning consultant and NGO member grounds her academic work in practical policy engagement.









