This event was presented in collaboration with the Department of Geography, the Department of Planning & Landscape Architecture, and the Institute for Regional & International Studies National Resource Center (IRIS NRC) at UW-Madison.
Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is Founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Ananya’s research and scholarship have focused on urban transformations and land grabs as well as on global capital and predatory financialization. Her books include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty; Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South, Asia, and Latin America; Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development; Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global; Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South; and Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Ananya leads a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. Her ongoing research, focused on Los Angeles, is concerned with “racial banishment,” the expulsion of working-class communities of color from cities through racialized policing and other forms of dispossession. Along with colleagues at UCLA, Ananya has recently led a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism, which is concerned with the place of racial others in liberal democracy. Situated at the present moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, the Sanctuary Spaces project foregrounds frameworks of freedom and justice. Ananya is a 2020 Freedom Scholar, an award bestowed by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to social justice leaders.