VANSHIKA SINGH

PhD Student

Research Title: Working with Water: Young People’s Geographies of Risk in Hyderabad
Research Group: Social and Cultural Geography (SCG)
Thesis Advisor: Prof Tim Bunnell
Co-advisor: Prof Tracey Skelton (University of Otago)

My research examines young people’s response to planetary breakdown, by producing a place-based understanding of the practices through which they make sense of and respond to risks with tacit and visceral intelligence of local materials, structures, services & infrastructure within low-income neighbourhoods in Hyderabad. Using pervasive water-borne infections as an issue of focus, my ethnographic analysis foregrounds reparative southern urbanism by exploring the relationship between knowledge, agency and practice for young people in neighbourhoods. As I explore this, I inquire the role played by intersectional difference deriving from structures of caste, class, gender, and religion in affecting urban youth's ability to handle risks produced through the combination of urban, corporeal, epidemiological and ecological factors.

From 2016 onwards, I studied risk vis-a-vis urban services at Hyderabad Urban Lab (HUL), a multidisciplinary urban research and action centre as part of the Tacit Urban Knowledge Network (TURN) in India. Eventually, I hope to set up an interdisciplinary Water and Waste Conservatory that will design equity driven preparedness and response to risk, and engage with places and policies across contexts. I mimic this desire by moving between Delhi where I learnt English Literature and Sociology, Hyderabad where I practices research, Singapore - a city that gives me the space to examine new methodologies with ethical reflexivity and tools of academic knowledge production, and my ancestral village Bhalaut, where I hope to power my vision of equity and sustainability through innovative organisational practices.