Kendra Kintzi

Kendra Kintzi is an Atkinson Center for Sustainability postdoctoral associate in the Department of Global Development at Cornell. She received her PhD in Development Studies at Cornell in 2023. Her work advances scholarship in three key areas: the politics of decarbonization; political ecologies of digital infrastructure; and mobilizations for environmental justice in the (post)colonial world. Her dissertation and first book project examines the material politics of renewable energy development in the Levant, focusing on democratic and community-based forms of energy governance. She centers decolonial feminist approaches to ask how urban communities in Jordan experience and shape processes of environmental and infrastructural change. Questions of resource governance, urbanization, and the political economy of development drive her research, as she examines how mobilization around energy access challenges the distributive politics of the (post)colonial state. She is also currently a Global Racial Justice Fellow at Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Originally from California, Kendra completed joint bachelors degrees in Development Studies and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, and spent several years working to advance inclusive, sustainable development at the grassroots and bilateral levels before coming to Cornell.