Dr Ayona Datta Contact details: Room number: Y310 Cities Programme, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE a.datta2@lse.ac.uk Secretarial Support: Anna Livia Johnston, Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6828 [ Homepage ] [ Publications ] [ Research ] [ Teaching ] [ Other Activities ] [ Cities Programme ]
	Dr. Ayona Datta
	Position 2005 - present:	Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design Cities Programme, Department of Sociology
	Dr Ayona Datta has an interdisciplinary background in architecture, environmental design and planning, and her teaching and research spans across sociology, geography, and architecture. Her broader research interests are in the connections between social, political, and material geographies of cities. Research interests include:  Urban transformations in the globalising South; Critical geographies of architecture; Translocal geographies; Politics of gender, place, and social agency; and Politics of sustainability. She conducts research on these themes through a range of qualitative methods including interviewing, participant observation, architectural mapping, participant photography, and visual narratives.
	Recent research awards:
	Politics of Sustainable Development: Mobility and 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 funded by European Science Foundation, Chair: Ayona Datta; Co-Chair: Kathy Burrell 6^th-10^th August 2010, Linkoping, Sweden. Click here to stay informed This conference brings together invited speakers 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.
	Forthcoming Books:
	Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections (Edited with Katherine Brickell) forthcoming in 2010 with Ashgate ‘Translocal Geographies’ sets out a new agenda for mobility which emphasises the enduring connectedness between and embeddedness within places during the experience of mobility. While in recent years, a proliferation of debates has emerged around the links between mobility, movement and the formation of transnational or diasporic identities, 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.
	Illegal Geographies of the City: Gender, Politics, and Space in a Squatter Settlement (Research monograph) This book traces the connections between gender, social agency, and everyday marginal places in a globalising city of the South. In particular, it presents an analysis of how ‘illegal geographies’ of New Delhi as constructed through judicial rulings and mapped onto squatter settlements, are negotiated by its residents in their everyday places. In so doing, this book articulates the significance of those places in squatter settlements that are the sites of production of social agency and gender performance -- places are continually erased as New Delhi aspires to become a ‘world city’.