Dr Ayona Datta Contact details: Cities Programme, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE a.datta2_AT_lse.ac.uk [ Homepage ] [ Publications ] [ Research ] [ Teaching ] [ Talks/Lectures/Service ] [ Cities Programme ]
	Dr. Ayona Datta
	Dr Ayona Datta is lecturer in the Department of Sociology. She has an interdisciplinary background in architecture, environmental design and planning, and her teaching and research spans across sociology, geography, and architecture. Her research broadly focuses on the connections between social, political, and material geographies of cities. Research interests:  Politics of law, gender and space; Translocal geographies;  Politics of sustainability. Methods: Semi-structured interviews, participant observations, architectural mapping and participant photography.
	Books
	The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement 2012 (forthcoming) Farnham: Ashgate The Illegal City explores the relationship between space, law and gendered subjectivity through a close look at an ‘illegal’ squatter settlement in Delhi. This book uses a gendered intersectional lens to explore how a ‘violence of law’ shapes how public subjectivities of gender, class, religion and caste are encountered and negotiated within the private spaces of home, family and neighbourhood. This book suggests that resettlement is not a condition that squatters desire; rather something that is seen as the only way out of the ‘illegal’ city. The wait for resettlement is a temporal space of anxiety and uncertainty, where particular kinds of politics around law, space and gender takes shape, which transform squatters’ relations with the state, urban development, civil society, and with each other. Through their everyday struggles around water, sanitation, social and political organisation and the transformation of their homes and families, this book shows that the desire for the 'legal city' is also the irony and utopia of home, which will remain an incomplete gendered project - both for the state and for squatters.
		Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections (Co-edited with K Brickell) 2011, Farnham: Ashgate ‘Translocal Geographies’ sets out an agenda for examining mobility and movement which emphasises the enduring connectedness between and embeddedness within places. This book argues for a spatial understanding of translocality that situates the migrant experience within/across particular ‘locales’ without confining it to the territorial boundedness of the nation-state.
	Recent research awards:
	Politics of Sustainable Development along the Mumbai-Pune Expressway ESRC-ICSSR India-UK Scholar Exchange Award 2009-2010 (RES-072-27-0044) Host: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research examines the politics of ‘sustainable development’ in the construction of the Mumbai-Pune expressway and what this means for the ways that ‘environment’ is imagined, produced, and  discoursed in the region. The aims of this research will be to: describe and analyse how the ‘environment’ is politicised around development and class-based mobilities along the Mumbai-Pune expressway; describe and analyse how ‘sustainable development’ becomes the terrain of negotiations among a range of decision-makers along the Mumbai-Pune expressway; advance theoretical work on the ways in which the relations between state, civil society, and class-based mobility shape the politics of sustainability along high-speed transport infrastructures.
	Home, Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies Conference Chair (funded by European Science Foundation) 6^th-10^th August 2010, Linkoping, Sweden. This conference brings together invited speakers, established and young researchers from a variety of social sciences and humanities disciplines to discuss narratives of migration and movement during the past and present, through a range of methodological perspectives – textual, visual, aural, architectural, and participatory. It aims to mobilise migrant narratives as a way of interrogating both historical and contemporary landscapes of movement and mobility, through interdisciplinary dialogue and comparative empirical contexts.