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Sophie Khogali (Fall 2023)
Sophie is an International Exchange Student at the City Institute from September to December 2023. She completed her BA in Political Science and Human Geography in 2022 and is currently a graduate student in the MA program “Geographies of Globalization, Markets and Metropoles” at the Institute for Human Geography at Goethe University focusing on Economic Geography and Mobility Studies.
Sophie's research interests include labour, migration, gender, and questions of mobility justice from the perspective of social and economic geography as well as (feminist) Marxist theories. She is particularly interested in the colonial character of automobility and its entanglement with globalized capitalism. In particular, she examines the genesis of automobility as a political process and the prevalence of counter-hegemonic and hegemonic discourse concerning issues of urban mobility.
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Philipp Leserer (Fall 2022)
Philipp is an International Visitor and Exchange Student at the City Institute from September to December 2022. He is a graduate student of the Goethe-Universit Frankfurt in the master program “Geographies of Globalization — Markets and Metropolises” focusing on Urban Geography.
His research interests include gentrification processes from an historical-geographical materialism view. Philipp's main fields have been on financialization and privatization of the housing market, the rent gap theory and neoliberal governance in the city. In particular, he looks at German corporate landlords, explores their enterprise model and how they generate profits. In addition, he is concerned with forced evictions as the most violent form of displacement.
![Nils Boettge](https://www.yorku.ca/cityinstitute/wp-content/uploads/sites/247/2021/03/nils-e1628296701600.jpg)
Nils Boettge (Fall 2017)
Nils is a student of human geography at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He is at YU for one term as an exchange student at the FES, where he is taking courses of the urban planning stream. His focus is on urban geography and mobility research in general. He's working on the potential topic of his masters thesis, which could be related to free provided parking spaces in cities an their negative impact on planning.
![Richard Bůžek](https://www.yorku.ca/cityinstitute/wp-content/uploads/sites/247/2021/03/DSCF2084-e1628296820198-1024x1024.jpg)
Richard Bůžek (Fall 2017)
Master candidate, Department of Human Geography, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main
Richard is a graduate student from the Frankfurt master program “Geographies of Globalization” with a major in Economic Geography. He is interested in processes and implications of uneven geographical development, especially regarding peripheralization. Against this backdrop, his research focused on rural protest against wind power plants in Northeast-Germany as well as elderly people’s access to care in the context of care drain in Northeast-Romania.