Welcome!

My name's Renz and I use they/them pronouns. Here's what I'm up to as of Summer 2024:

Renz smiles with their first crappie catch
My first crappie catch. Photo credit to Matteo Cleary

About me

I am in large part my geographies. My blood wells up from Central Luzon in the Philippines - and from there comes my skin, tongue, and one of my cultures. I'm rooted in the Lake Wales Ridge in Florida, a land of hyperendemic scrub mints, the suburban hinterland of citrus' collapse, and an odd Filipino enclave. My stints across the US - longest in Seattle and Gainesville - have given me a lens for a geographical world view, one that includes place, flux, conflict, dialectic, and endless critique.

I study flows of capital and capital fixes. My research tends to revolve around at least one of three crisis inflection points: the 2008 recession and its role in reshaping the US housing market, COVID and the great reordering of space + inflation, and disaster/future climate collapse and capital's aversion of/investment into risk. Quantiative analysis of big data is my M.O. - my most recent work, Who owns our homes is the first of a series that explores data methods of mapping the growth of institutional investment in housing. Capital postpones and defers crisis through many fixes - I try to capture at least some of the novel ones.

I see our horizons for revolution dwindling as life becomes harder to live. Capitalism totalizes every aspect of being, a state that withdraws care and continues to expand the free market carceral landscape, and a climate future that gets bleaker and bleaker. My positive project with my research is that through the synthesis of data, theory, and narrative, I can create pictures and mappings of the landscapes of conflict we find ourselves in. From this map, I hope to create a vision for the genesis of the world whose future shines on us.