Niamh Costello

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Niamh (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in Social Welfare. Her research focuses on barriers to resolving poverty and homelessness within social welfare systems and the potential of transformative social protection interventions. Her doctoral research examines the homeless response system in Los Angeles, exploring barriers to permanent housing access and the disproportionate incidence of these barriers for unhoused people of colour. Using ethnographic methods, this work draws on two years of participant observation in the South Los Angeles homeless service community and centres the critical perspectives of Black-led homeless service providers.

Niamh holds an MSc in Public Policy and Human Development from Maastricht University, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Prior to her time at UCLA, Niamh worked at Housing Justice in London.

Liz Koslov

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Liz Koslov is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Environment and Sustainability, and Sociology at UCLA. Her research brings an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach to analyzing the politics of urban climate change adaptation, particularly debates over how to respond to sea-level rise, flooding, and wildfire. At UCLA she teaches on climate change through the lens of the built environment, the social life of sea-level rise, and environmental and climate justice.

Much of Dr. Koslov’s work critically examines the idea and process of “managed retreat” from high-risk areas. She is writing a book, Retreat: Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate-Changed City, that follows homeowners in Staten Island, New York, who organized to seek buyouts after Hurricane Sandy that would permanently demolish portions of their neighborhoods. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she leads a collaborative project on the intersection of managed retreat and wildfire (see also this New York Times guest essay). Additional interests include the shifting meanings of urban natures, the politics of risk mapping, and media and climate change.

Before coming to UCLA, Dr. Koslov was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. She received a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, where she was affiliated with the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Superstorm Research Lab, a mutual-aid research collective studying climate change, disaster, inequality, and urban politics. She holds an MSc in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literatures from the George Washington University.