Municipal finance, public infrastructure, urban street markets, governing/governance, decentralization, fiscal autonomy, liberal administration, global development, urban and planning theory, value, publics, territory, risk, West Africa, ethnography.

I am a scholar of urban planning, politics, and policy, and I conduct ethnographic research on infrastructural and financial politics in West African cities. My research makes a conceptual contribution to the social scientific scholarship on sovereignty, government, and expertise at the urban (and continental) scale.

I recently finished my PhD at DCRP and am now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales (IRISSO) at the Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris Sciences et Lettres. This research is titled "Continental Planning: Pan-Africanism and the Infrastructures of High Finance". It is funded by the Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société (IFRIS), a program in the field of science and technology studies.

I am also currently working on my book manuscript, tentatively titled "Communal Autonomy: The Politics of Public Finance in a Democratic Dakar", and have a couple articles on this topic in the pipeline as well. In this research, I analyse the emergence of municipal authority in Senegal, and the political disputes surrounding the transformation of this authority today. I develop theoretical insights from science and technology studies and postcolonial studies to reconsider how planners and social scientists have hereto understood municipal government and the re-scaling of statehood in and beyond urban Africa.

CP 200 History of City Planning (with Stephen Collier) 

GMS 200 Global Metropolitan Studies: Introduction to Theories, Histories, & Methods (with Joan Walker) 

DS 100 History & Theory of Development (with Gillian Hart)

Environmental Policies (taught at Temple University)

Global Cities (taught at Temple University)

Coping with the Vacant City (designed and taught at Temple University)

Cirolia, L.R. & Mizes, J.C. (2019) Property tax in African secondary cities: Insights from the cases of Kisumu (Kenya) and M’Bour (Senegal). International Center for Tax and Development Working Paper 90. Access at link.

Mizes, J.C & Cirolia, L.R. (2018) Contournements: Fiscalité et exceptions informelles dans les villes de M'Bour et de Kisumu. Politique Africaine. Special Issue: Fiscalité en Afrique contemporaine : Formalités et informalités. English version available online. 

Mizes, J.C. (2016) Who Owns Africa’s Infrastructure? Limn Issue Number Seven: Public Infrastructure/Infrastructural Publics. Access at link.

Collier, S. J, Mizes, J. C, Von Schnitzler, A. (2016) Preface: Public Infrastructure/Infrastructural Publics. Limn Issue Number Seven: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics. Access at link.