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Dr Ayona Datta
Contact details:
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Dr. Ayona Datta |
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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. |
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Recent research awards: |
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Politics
of Sustainable Development: Mobility and Development along the Mumbai-Pune
Expressway. 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. |
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Home, Migration and the
City: New Narratives, New Methodologies
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Forthcoming Books: |
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Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections (Co-edited with Katherine Brickell) forthcoming in 2010 with 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. |
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Waiting for Resettlement: Illegality, Gender and Agency in a Delhi Slum (completed research monograph under review) This book traces the connections between gender, social agency, and everyday places in Delhi. In particular, it presents an analysis of how ‘illegal geographies’ of New Delhi as constructed through judicial rulings and mapped onto its slums, are negotiated by its residents in their everyday lives as they struggle for access to housing, land and urban basic services. In so doing, this book articulates the significance of those everyday places that are the sites of production of social agency and gender politics -- places are continually erased as New Delhi aspires to become a ‘world city’. |
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