Ananya Roy | |
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Born | 22 January 1970 ![]() |
Occupation | University teacher ![]() |
Awards |
Ananya Roy is a scholar of international development and global urbanism. Born in Calcutta, India (1970), Roy is Professor and Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She has been a professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Comparative Urban Studies (1992) degree from Mills College, and Master of City Planning (1994) and Doctor of Philosophy (1999) degrees from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley.
Roy works in three major areas:
Roy engages with feminist and ethnographic methodologies and often draws upon post-colonial feminism for theoretical inspiration.
In the field of urban studies, Roy is well known for advancing the theoretical concept of "urban informality" [1] and the call for "new geographies of theory" that are attentive to the urban condition of the global South. [2] She argues for a transnational approach to urbanism and urban planning, and more recently, for a transnational approach to politics and ethics. [3]
In 2015 Roy was named Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare and Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She had been Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California at Berkeley, and, prior to that, held the Friesen Chair in Urban Studies and was a founder of the Urban Studies major at UC Berkeley. She also served as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, where she was the founding chair of the undergraduate minor in Global Poverty and Practice at UC Berkeley. [4] She served as co-director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center from 2009 to 2012, and she served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies from 2005 to 2009.
At Berkeley, Roy taught graduate and undergraduate students. Her undergraduate course, "Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium," drew 700 students each Fall at UC Berkeley. In 2006, she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. Also in 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Mentors award, a recognition bestowed by the Graduate Assembly of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2008, Roy was the recipient of the Golden Apple Teaching award, the only teaching award given by the student body. She was the 2009 California Professor of the Year by CASE/Carnegie Foundation. Most recently, Roy received the 2011 Excellence in Achievement Award of the California Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement recognition.
Along with colleagues in the UC system, Roy has been active in the mobilizations for public education in California. Her role in such struggles was chronicled in The New Yorker in 2009. [5] Roy herself has written about fragile solidarities of the movement under the theme, "We Are All Students of Color Now". [6] Roy has appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss these issues, as well as her work on poverty capitalism.
Her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development [7] is the recipient of the 2011 Paul Davidoff Book Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. The primary book award in urban planning, the Davidoff prize "recognizes an outstanding book publication promoting participatory planning and positive social change, opposing poverty and racism as factors in society and seeking ways to reduce disparities between rich and poor; white and black; men and women." [8] Roy has argued that microfinance is an instrument of financial inclusion, a part of the "democratization of capital," but also that it is potentially a new global subprime market, one in which debt is securitized and traded [9] In a recent special issue of Public Culture, which she guest-edited, Roy highlights the making of poverty capitalism and markets in humanitarian goods [10] Her work contrasts such approaches with poverty interventions that are concerned with social protection and the transformation of inequality.
In 2014, Roy, in conjunction with the Blum Center for Developing Economies and the UCLA Luskin Institute for Inequality and Democracy developed the #GlobalPOV project. The project uses digital and social media to expand the conversation about global poverty beyond the confinements of academia. Rather than provide solutions to global poverty, it encourages people to reflect and critically engage with their relationship to spatially distant poverty as well as poverty that exists within the context of one’s everyday life. Videos narrated by Roy, Khalid Kadir (UC Berkeley lecturer), Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales (University of San Francisco professor), and Clare Talwalker (UC Berkeley lecturer) are uploaded to YouTube, and conversations are encouraged over twitter via the hashtag, #GlobalPOV. [11] [12]
Since the inauguration of President Trump in 2016, Roy has published several articles about the need for planners to be politically engaged. Together with the UCLA Abolitionist Planning Group, Roy created a resource guide titled “Abolitionist Planning for Resistance” that frames key issues around which to mobilize political action such as civil liberties, policing, housing rights, union labor, sanctuary cities, and environmental justice. [13]
In her article “The Infrastructure of Assent: Professions in the Age of Trumpism,” Roy criticizes the eagerness of built environment professions, specifically architecture, planning and international development, to uncritically align themselves with racist governments, institutions, figures of power in exchange for recognition and profit. She argues that students, educators, and professionals must reject a culture of complicity and develop one of “disobedience, refusal and resistance.” [14]
Corporatocracy or corpocracy is an economic, political and judicial system controlled or influenced by business corporations or corporate interests.
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled nearly US$40 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent. The first economist who had invented the idea of microloans was Jonathan Swift in the 1720s. Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts, to the poor. Modern microcredit is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank founded in Bangladesh in 1983 by their current Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus. Many traditional banks subsequently introduced microcredit despite initial misgivings. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit. As of 2012, microcredit is widely used in developing countries and is presented as having "enormous potential as a tool for poverty alleviation."
Microfinance consists of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses (SMEs) who lack access to conventional banking and related services.
Accion is an international nonprofit. Founded as a community development initiative serving the poor in Venezuela, it works with local partners in different countries to develop and scale digital financial solutions for underserved people globally.
The College of Environmental Design, also known as the Berkeley CED, or simply CED, is one of fifteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. The school is located in Bauer Wurster Hall on the southeast corner of the main UC Berkeley campus. It is composed of five departments: the Department of Architecture, the Department of City and Regional Planning, the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and the Institute of Urban & Regional Development.
The terms poverty industry or poverty business refer to a wide range of money-making activities that attract a large portion of their business from the poor. Businesses in the poverty industry often include payday loan centers, pawnshops, rent-to-own centers, casinos, liquor stores, lotteries, tobacco stores, credit card companies, and bail-bond services. Illegal ventures such as loansharking might also be included. The poverty industry makes roughly US$33 billion a year in the United States. In 2010, elected American federal officials received more than $1.5 million in campaign contributions from poverty-industry donors.
Mark Andrew LeVine is an American historian, musician, writer, and professor. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
Edward William Soja was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice.
Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Previously, she was Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
The UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs is the public affairs/public service graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles. The school consists of three graduate departments—Public Policy, Social Welfare, and Urban Planning—and an undergraduate program in Public Affairs that began accepting students in 2018. In all, the school offers three undergraduate minors, the undergraduate major, three master's degrees, and two doctoral degrees.
Randall Crane is an American urban planner who is professor emeritus of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, where he taught since 1999. He was associate then editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Planning Association, chair of the executive committee and director of Undergraduate Studies of the Luskin School, associate and acting director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, and department vice chair and director of PhD studies of the urban planning department, among other cross-campus administrative appointments.
Nezar Al Sayyad is an architect, city planner, urban designer, urban historian, and professor emeritus at the University of California Berkeley in the College of Environmental Design, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Educated as an architect, planner, and urban historian, AlSayyad is principally an urbanist whose specialty is the study of cities, their urban forms and spaces, and their impact on their social and cultural realities. As a scholar, AlSayyad has written and edited several books on colonialism, identity, Islamic architecture, tourism, tradition, urbanism, urban design, urban history, urban informality, and virtuality.
Aihwa Ong is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities. She is specifically interested in the connection and links between an array of social sciences such as; sociocultural anthropology, urban studies, and science and technology studies, as well as medicine and the arts.
The UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) is an interdisciplinary research unit within the College of Letters & Science, Division of Social Science, dedicated to research, teaching, and discussion of labor and employment issues. It was founded in 1945 as the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations. It is part of a network of research programs in the University of California system including the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, and research units on six other campuses. The IRLE is home to the UCLA Labor Center, the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH), the Human Resources Round Table, and other research programs. The IRLE also supports the UCLA Labor Studies undergraduate program.
Martin Wachs (1941–2021) was an American professor emeritus of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and of City and Regional Planning and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career in university teaching in 1968 and retired from teaching in 2006, to work at the Rand Corporation until 2010.
Jean Paul Bourdier is a photographer and Professor of Architecture, Photography and Visual Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Katharyne Mitchell is an American geographer who is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gray space is a theoretical concept that explains the causes and consequences of a rapid expansion in informal and temporary urban development, widely prevalent in contemporary city regions. It argues that the rise of informality reflects a significant transformation of urban regime and citizenship. The concept was formulated by Geographer and urbanist Oren Yiftachel who noted that through a process of 'gray spacing', urban society is increasingly being governed under frameworks of 'separate and unequal', spawning greater uneven fragmentation, conflict and ethno-class stratification. Urban and planning theorists are thus challenged by this theory to reinvent equal and just forms of belonging and resources allocation in the increasingly informal city. In geography, land use planning, and epidemiology, the term 'grey space' is used to refer to urban land covers that are not green, as an antonym of urban green space. Recent work in Leisure Studies has sought to define this urban "grey space" as a material and symbolic feature of outdoor leisure pursuits, like skateboarding.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is a Greek-American academic. She is the Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a Distinguished Professor of urban planning and urban design at UCLA. She is also a core faculty of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. She served as Associate Provost for Academic Planning at UCLA from 2016-2019, and she has been the Associate Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs since 2010. She was the chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning from 2002-2008. She is a public space scholar and has examined transformations in the public realm and public space in cities, and their associated social meanings and impacts on urban residents. An underlying theme of her research is its user focus, as it seeks to comprehend the built environment from the perspective of different, often vulnerable, user groups.
Faranak Miraftab is an Iranian-American urban scholar and is currently a professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is known for her works on urban planning and development. She is a winner of Davidoff Book Award and American Sociological Association's Global & Transnational Sociology section Book Award and a finalist in C. Wright Mills Book Award for her book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking.