Elsa Noterman

Elsa Noterman is a third-year graduate student pursuing a PhD in Human Geography. She earned a BA in Political Science at Haverford College in 2006. After graduating, she first worked at a public high school in Philadelphia and then worked as a researcher at a nonprofit think tank in Washington D.C., primarily focusing on community development in rural areas of the United States. Last year she completed a MSc in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her master’s research explored the complex socio-spatial relations and emerging economic possibilities in manufactured housing (or mobile home) communities in New Hampshire and Wisconsin where residents organized as cooperatives in response to the threat of eviction. In her dissertation she plans to develop an analytical model for exploring the fluid and multiple everyday activities involved in the collective management of common resources by heterogeneous communities. With the generous support of the Scott Kloeck-Jenson Fellowship, she plans to undertake pre-dissertation research in the Christiania area of Copenhagen, Denmark this summer. Conducting in-depth interviews and participating in community life she will explore how the residents of Christiania, who have resisted property relations and state intervention for over forty years, are individually and collectively negotiating the recent formation of a legalized collective ownership model.