Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is inaugural Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working in alliance with social movements, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality, within and beyond the university. Ananya’s work has focused on urban transformations and land grabs as well as on global capital and predatory financialization. With enduring theoretical commitments to postcolonial critique, feminist thought, and critical race studies, she refuses the whiteness of canons of knowledge, forging theory and pedagogy attentive to historical difference. Currently, Ananya leads a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. Her own research is concerned with “racial banishment,” the expulsion of working-class communities of color from cities through racialized policing and other forms of dispossession.  For this work, Ananya was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2020. Ananya’s academic books include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty; Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South, Asia, and Latin America; Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global; Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South; Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World; and the forthcoming Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism.

15 January 2024, 09:10 AM
AS8 04-04 Seminar Room, National University of Singapore

Research Justice: Organizing Knowledge in Unequal Cities
Elite universities in unequal cities have a long history of extractive modes of research. They are also often agents of gentrification and other forms of socio-spatial inequality. In this talk, Ananya Roy lays out a conceptual framework of research justice, which includes principles of accountability and reciprocity, as an alternative mode of organizing and making knowledge. One of the key foundations of research justice is the recognition that social movements and freedom struggles actively theorize the world, thereby shifting how knowledge is produced, by whom, and for what purpose. Ananya will argue that this is a “reworlding” of knowledge, making possible new imaginations and practices of a public Asian Studies.