Teyah Payne is a human geographer working under Naho Mirumachi. She also serves as the current research assistant to the KCL Water Centre.
While she’s new to the KCL Geography research cohort, she’s not new to the department as she completed her MS in Water Science and Governance in 2020. She started her PhD in fall 2021, and her project looks at emotional geographies of groundwater governance in the south-central US.
Specifically, she aims to explore how present structures of groundwater governance in the US: (1) impact the emotions of marginalised, BIPOC female bodies; and (2) how these emotions influence the capacity of their bodies to affect change or mediate conflicts concerning access, allocation, governance, etc. of groundwater.
Her fundamental research interest is to help enrich feminist political ecology and environmental justice in their understanding of the complexities of emotional geographies in (ground)water-society relations. She’s also more broadly interested in water security for BIPOC women, biopolitics of water, and relational (non-material) aspects of water.
Outside of academia, Teyah serves as a member of Groundwater Relief, a non-profit that provides technical support to organisations engaged in supplying water to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, and the International Association of Hydrogeologists.
Want to see more from Teyah? Follow King’s Water @KingsWaterKCL for more updates on her work within the hub!