Lucy Garbett

Lucy Garbett is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research interests include political economy, infrastructural violence, social reproduction, property relations, and critical ethnographic methods, with a regional focus on Palestine and the broader Middle East. Her dissertation examines the political economy of urban planning and infrastructure in East Jerusalem, specifically how settler-colonial planning structures shape Palestinian construction practices and property relations. Through ethnographic research, she reveals how bureaucratic infrastructures operate as forms of violence that create classed and temporal inequalities. She has published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, The Guardian, and Middle East Report, and currently serves as Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.

Lucy's project for the Mapping Connections Early Career Fellowship investigates the emerging "East-East" energy axis between Gulf states and China through the case of ACWA Power, a Saudi renewable energy firm with significant Chinese investment. Through mapping these energy infrastructures and their entanglements, Lucy's work contributes to critical debates on green colonialism, uneven development, and the political economy of energy transitions in the region.