Professor Claire Hancock

Claire Hancock is professor of geography at Université Paris-Est Créteil (France) and a member of the Lab’Urba research unit.

She works at the intersection of urban studies and gender studies in a feminist, and increasingly decolonial, perspective, shaped by the banlieue context where she has been privileged to teach for the past 28 years.

One strand of her research deals with the exclusionary mechanisms of French public space, recently drawing on critical legal geography approaches, and focusing on evictions relating to the Paris Olympics (a collective report commissioned by the Défenseure des droits was finalized in 2025 with Muriel Froment-Meurice).

Another strand questions access to housing from a gender perspective, thanks to funding by the Institut Universitaire de France, and led to Claire joining the steering committee of the Gender and Housing working group of the European Network of Housing Research. Her interests do extend beyond Europe though, with Mexico as an important reference point, and Latin America generally as a source of theoretical inspiration.

After publishing several pieces in Anglophone journals such as Gender, Place and Culture and Environment and Planning D or Political Geography, Claire is increasingly committed to publishing in authentically open-access journals rather than taking part in the charade of high-ticket 'open access' for sale in such journals, and seriously wonders at the number of Anglo 'radical geographers' who go along with it.

She jointly edits the online open access bilingual journal Justice Spatiale/Spatial Justice and has published anthologies of translations from Anglo scholarship, with a concern for language power relations and ethics in knowledge production and dissemination, and the politics of citation.