Elsa Noterman

Elsa Noterman is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she serves as Director of the City Centre. She joined QMUL in September 2022 after completing a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge (2020-2022), and holds a PhD and MS in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her educational background includes:

• PhD in Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• MS in Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Noterman's research centers on everyday collective struggles over land and housing through critical legal, feminist, decolonial, and antiracist lenses. She examines il/legal geographies of property (e.g., urban vacancy in Philadelphia), housing crisis responses (e.g., limited-equity cooperatives), land justice reparations (e.g., UK land reparations workshops), and feminist pedagogical spaces. Her work bridges social sciences and humanities using qualitative, participatory, and critical cartographic methods to challenge normative power regimes while centering community-driven outcomes.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals consistent focus on property contestation across urban, legal, and carceral contexts. Key trends include decolonial approaches to land reparations (2023-2025), feminist reinterpretations of 'safe space' in academia (2021), and critical examinations of vacancy as both site of dispossession and resistance (2020-2023). Disciplinary intersections span legal geography, urban studies, and critical race theory with methodological emphasis on participatory action research.

Her academic supervision includes:

• Current PhD: Isadora Bellati (LAHP-funded, Brazil land disputes)
• Former PhD: Jacob Stringer (ESRC-funded, renters' unions in Barcelona/London)

Noterman actively collaborates with community groups including Shared Assets, Seeding Reparations, and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign on projects ranging from gender-inclusive green space design in Tower Hamlets to the East London Atlas profiling student research. She directs the City Centre and co-developed an open-source land justice curriculum through participatory student internships in Cambridge.