I am a geographer and environmental designer based at the University of Chicago, where I am affiliated faculty with the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, Senior Research Associate in Global Political Ecology and Associate Director of the Urban Theory Lab. My research broadly explores the relationships between space, nature, technics, and power. I teach classes, studios, and workshops that combine global and development studies with GIScience and digital geography, urban, environmental, and landscape studies, critical theory, and science and technology studies. I work across conventional and creative forms within and outside academia, including writing, mapping, design, video, and other media. My first book Ecologies of Power (MIT Press 2016), co-authored with Pierre Bélanger, investigated the logistical landscapes and infrastructural environments of global U.S. militarism beyond the battlefield, and won the John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize for Landscape Studies. While doing research for that book, I became especially interested in how "geo-technical" ways of seeing, knowing, and representing more fluid environments-- oceans, snow and sea ice, seismic landscapes, fire-- shape spatial imaginaries of political and economic power, particularly in moments of socio-environmental crisis. My current book projects engage these themes in two different contexts. The first excavates the role of geography and earth sciences in structuring oceanic interventions of U.S. imperialism in the North Pacific and Arctic from the 1850s through the 1970s. The second develops a geographic genealogy of spatial research on "mass fire" (a term describing any fire, urban or wild, of high intensity) and associated hazards from the mid-19th century through the present. The book traces out a "pyropolitics" of anticipatory global governance over people, environments, and the increasingly extreme events characteristic of the current climate conjuncture. I also work on a number of grant-funded projects with collaborators from across civil society, the social and spatial sciences, humanities, climate and life sciences, and design that aim to advance struggles for climate justice through research and service, especially through public-facing spatial media. This work includes the CLIMATE RIGHTS Project (Norwegian Research Council) with INTERPRT, which examines evidentiary regimes of contemporary climate litigation and generates multi-media materials for ongoing cases involving our community partners; another project (Peder Sather Institute for Advanced Study) on the “political life” of the ice edge as a contested cartographic object mediating contentious "just transition" debates over oil and deep sea mineral extraction in the Arctic and beyond; and a project (National Science Foundation) with communities and researchers at the Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site to find new, bottom-up ways to design and visualize the complex socio-ecological impacts of climate change. I completed my PhD in 2021 in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. I hold degrees in Landscape Architecture (MLA, Harvard University Graduate School of Design), Human Rights, and Philosophy (BA, Columbia University). I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area on unceded Coast Miwok land, and currently live and work on the South Side of Chicago, homelands of the Niswi-mishkodewin (Council of the Three Fires)-- the Odawak (Odawa), Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe), and Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi). You can contact me at aarroyo [at] uchicago.edu.