Rate My Professor David Jordhus-Lier

David Jordhus-Lier is a professor in the field of labour and economic geography at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Manchester, completed in 2008, with a thesis titled “The practice of neoliberalism: Responses to public sector restructuring across the labour-community divide in Cape Town.” He also earned a Cand. Polit. degree in Human Geography from the University of Oslo in 2005. His career began as a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR), Department for International Studies, from 2008 to 2012. He joined the University of Oslo as an associate professor in August 2012 and was promoted to full professor in September 2015.

Jordhus-Lier specializes in political and economic geography, with research interests centered on organised labour, the politics of work, social movements, trade union adaptation to change, climate change transitions, flexible labour markets, and urban informality. His empirical studies cover topics such as the green transition in the Norwegian petroleum industry, restructuring of warehouse employment in the Oslo region, domestic worker rights in Indonesia, and informal settlements in South Africa. Key publications include "The Roles and Intersections of Constrained Labour Agency" co-authored with Neil M. Coe (Antipode, 2024), "Anchoring a just transition: The ambivalent roles of Norwegian trade unions" (Energy Research & Social Science, 2024), "Structuring a Conversation Across Time, Space and Political Distance" (Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2024), "Samfunnsgeografi: En innføring" (Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2017), and "The Politics of Slums in the Global South" (co-editor, Routledge, 2015). He received the 2010 PhD Prize from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) Economic Geography Research Group and was granted accredited teacher status at UiO from 2021 to 2024. Currently, he coordinates the BA and MA programs in Human Geography (2024-2027), leads UiO's Pedagogisk Akademi in 2025, and previously served as academic coordinator of Osloforskning (2019-2024).