Katie Poltz is a nontraditional academic who had a 15-year career in LGBTQI+ community organizing and the Arts before embarking on a Research Masters Urban Studies at UvA under the guidance of Professor Robert Kloosterman (2020). Her thesis compared the production of queer spaces in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, where she completed four months of fieldwork in Fall 2019 during the peak of the Anti-ELAB/pro-democracy protests. Holding a bachelor’s degree major in International Relations and minor in Sociology from American University (DC), Katie’s research interests include: queer theory, the urban commons, social and political movements, the intersection of art and politics, globalization, the production of space, and proxemics, with a focus on the Global East, particularly China and Hong Kong.
Academic
