Co-founder of the Relational Poverty Network and Middle Class Poverty Politics project; Past-President of the Association of American Geographers (AAG); 2010 Marsha Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award winner; former Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, and Editor of Progress in Human Geography. Her work is concerned with the social and economic effects of global economic restructuring in the Americas and with articulating critical alternative conceptions of processes of impoverishment.

Recent publications include: 2011. Victoria Lawson with the Middle Class Poverty Politics Research Group. De-centering Poverty Studies: middle class alliances and the social construction of poverty, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. 2010. Victoria Lawson, Lucy Jarosz and Anne Bonds. 'Dumping grounds and unseen grounds: placing race, ethnicity and poverty in the American Northwest' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(3). 2008. Victoria Lawson, Lucy Jarosz and Anne Bonds. 'Building Economies from the bottom up: (mis)representations of poverty in the American Northwest' Social and Cultural Geography. 9(7), 737-753. Making Development Geography. (Hodder Arnold UK, 2007).