GENDERED TIME, SPEED AND VIOLENCE IN THE MARGINS OF INDIA’S URBAN AGE Speed is fundamental to shaping visions of the modern city and of contemporary urban life. Notions of speed and acceleration have produced distinct conceptualisations of rapid urbanization as a rush towards progress and opportunity. In this paper, I examine what speed looks like … Continue reading New publication: The ‘Smart safe city’’
EXPERIMENTS WITH FEMINIST URBAN FUTURES IN COMMUNITY PODCASTS This paper develops the concept of ‘thick time’ through podcast experiments that foreground feminist voice, speech and aurality. Drawing upon William Kentridge’s notion of ‘thick time’, this paper draws upon gendered experiences of struggles that are accumulated over generations, reinforced through technologies of timekeeping and time-management, leading … Continue reading New openaccess publication: ‘Thick time’
GENDERED AUTHORSHIP IN THE ‘CONTACT ZONE’ OF DELHI’S DIGITAL AND URBAN MARGINS This paper examines the curation of a month-long public exhibition titled #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] in one of New Delhi’s busiest metro stations, as a form of self-authorship by young women from its digital and urban margins. #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] is a metaphor for journeys, communications, … Continue reading New openaccess publication: Curating #Aanajaana
Self(ie)-governance: Technologies of intimate surveillance in India under COVID19 My commentary article for Dialogues in Human Geography "Self(ie)-governance: Technologies of intimate surveillance in India under COVID19" has been published. This article emerges in response to the proliferation of selfie based quarantine apps in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic and is a development of my ongoing fascination with … Continue reading New publication: Self(ie) governance
SURVIVAL INFRASTRUCTURES UNDER COVID19 IN INDIA I grew up hearing stories of Calcutta during the Bengal Famine of 1943 from my grandmother. The famine was an artificially created disaster under the watchful eyes of the British colonial government who denied Indian farmers access to food stocks, resulting in starvation and death – a genocide of about … Continue reading New publication: Survival infrastructures
This is the fourth podcast in the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’ in which specialists from arts, humanities and social sciences, think about the questions that the virus poses to our ways of life, of being and self understanding, both now and in the past. In this contribution Ayona Datta, Professor of Human Geography, thinks about survival infrastructures, and their collapse or dysfunctionality in the context of the mass exodus and precarity of migrant workers, forced to forsake the city because of India’s lockdown.
Gendering the Smart City 