Japhy Wilson’s research explores the intertwining of space, power and ideology in the politics of development. He completed his PhD in International Politics at the University of Manchester (2009), with a thesis addressing the contested production of space in southern Mexico. He was a Lecturer in International Political Economy in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Manchester, and a Teaching Fellow in International Politics at Manchester, and Hallsworth Research Fellow in Geography, also at Manchester.

He was granted leave to take up a temporary position as Research Coordinator at the National Strategic Centre for the Right to Territory (CENEDET) in Quito, Ecuador, a research institute led by David Harvey. He is working on the planetary urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon, drawing on historical geographical materialism and the psychoanalytic critique of ideology to disentangle the power relations though which social space is imagined, produced, and transformed. He is author of Extractivism and Universality: Inside an Uprising in the Amazon Abingdon (Routledge 2023), Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon New Haven (Yale University Press 2021), and Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid London and New York (Verso 2014).