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Angela Smith is a political and environmental geographer whose research investigates how infrastructure, law, and elemental environments shape practices of governance, mobility, and resistance. She is particularly interested in how political authority is exercised and contested through mobility systems, from civil aviation to security regimes. Working across political geography, infrastructure studies, critical theory, and environmental humanities, her research explores the material and affective dimensions of territorial control, migration, and security. Angela also draws on psychoanalytic theory to examine the unconscious investments and attachments that underpin both repressive state practices and liberatory projects of solidarity and struggle.

Angela is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at аIJʹÙÍø, where she teaches human geography, international studies, and environmental humanities. She was recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Western Sydney at Western Sydney University. She continues to undertake place-based research in Western Sydney focused on addressing spatial and class inequities. For this work, Angela was awarded a 2024 James Martin Institute Policy Challenge Grant.

Angela was a 2024 Visiting Fellow at NCCR – On the Move in Switzerland and a 2019 Fellow of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at The New School for Social Research in New York. Angela holds a Masters in Migration Studies from the American University in Cairo and a PhD from the Faculty of Law and Justice at аIJʹÙÍø.

Angela brings to her scholarship more than a decade of experience working with diverse communities and international organisations. She has particular expertise in the Middle East and North Africa region, where she has worked with the Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo, the North Africa Mixed Migration Task Force, Transparency International, UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF, World Social Forum, and Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London.