Crane teaches courses in cultural and political geography. His research focuses on geographies of social justice and injustice in Mexico and the Americas, with a secondary emphasis on Turkey and its regional contexts. Crane’s interest in cultural production and politics in an international context emerged from his family life, as the son of an immigrant from Turkey and a US-born specialist in Islamic art and architecture. Crane became more concretely interested in (lowercase-p) politics by participating in youth subcultures and community projects in his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. These experiences inspired travel to Mexico City in 2009, where Crane developed a research idea that would help him return to central Mexico twice per year while he completed his PhD in Geography at Ohio State (2014). Crane’s research in central Mexico continues through a collaborative project on violence and urban economic development in the region. More recently, Crane developed related research on urban cultural landscapes in the Aegean region of Turkey. Crane has published on a wide range of themes including the forms and practices of contemporary social movements, the spatiality of sovereign power, relationships between urban/peri-urban landscapes and violence, place-based memories of political violence, and methodologies of cultural and political geography. Since 2018, he has been the section editor for political geography in the journal Geography Compass.