About

Rachel Goffe is a geographer and a licensed architect, working at the intersections of place-making, livelihood and the state regulation of space. Broadly, her work aims to understand transformations of the postcolonial state by examining the shifting boundaries between formal and informal relationships to land and livelihood. Her fieldwork focuses on the encounter between recent policy to curtail squatting and traditions of Black life that emerged through durable yet insecure possession of small parcels of land in Jamaica, where she is from originally. Dr. Goffe earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Temple University and a Ph.D. in Geography from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is Assistant Professor at University of Toronto in the Departments of Human Geography (UTSC), and Geography and Planning, and affiliate faculty of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Center for Caribbean Studies.