Don Mitchell (born 1961) is professor of human geography at Uppsala University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the geography department at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
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Education and career
From an academic household in California, he is a graduate of San Diego State University (1987) and Pennsylvania State University (1989), as well as receiving his PhD from Rutgers University in 1992, working with Neil Smith. He taught at the University of Colorado Boulder before joining Syracuse University in the late 1990s.
In 1998, he became a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2008 a Guggenheim Fellow. He was awarded the Retzius Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 2012.
Scholarship
Considered an influential Marxist scholar, he is best known for his work on cultural theory, showing how landscapes embody historical links to struggle, oppression, and the unacknowledged labor involved in their creation and maintenance. He has applied this to the history of immigrant labor in California's agricultural landscapes, privatized public spaces, and public parks where homeless people are threatened or evicted.