The Public Scholars Initiative opens up new avenues for PhD students to disseminate their findings and contribute to the public good. I believe that the potential to have a broader impact through one’s doctoral research makes the PhD experience more fulfilling.
Research Description
The focus on home ownership in the post-liberalisation period has resulted in an absence of public and purpose-built rental housing in India. Therefore, individual landlords in the private rental market are the primary source of housing for migrant communities in the country (Naik, 2019). However, there is also a lack of policies that protect the safety and privacy of tenants, particularly those from minority communities (Pati, 2022). In this doctoral research, I explore the rental housing experiences of Indigenous migrant women from the northeast Indian borderlands and Himalayan foothills who live in metropolitan Indian cities. For migrant women, rental houses are spaces where they experience racial harassment, sexual violence and intrusive surveillance by landlords. Marginalisation of Indigenous people in metropolitan Indian cities is primarily rooted in racism. Despite being Indian citizens, they are often dislocated from the "Indian" identity due to their phenotypes (Wouters & Subba, 2013). Indigenous women in particular have been racialised and hyper-sexualised by mainland Indians. Moral anxieties pertaining to their bodies have subjected them to "othering" in urban India (McDuie-Ra, 2012). While this often translates into racialised and sexualised violence in public spaces (Puri, 2006) and their workplaces (Deori & Rajagopalan, 2018), my research focuses on how marginalisation manifests inside their rental houses. I have chosen as my study site the city of Bengaluru, which is one of the top metropolitan destinations for Indigenous migrant women in India.
What does being a Public Scholar mean to you?
The opportunity to be a part of this initiative, for me, means engaging with various forms of scholarships that currently exist outside the purview of the academic sector. I am excited about joining an extensive network of public scholars and learning new ways of creating meaningful impact with my research.
In what ways do you think the PhD experience can be re-imagined with the Public Scholars Initiative?
The Public Scholars Initiative opens up new avenues for PhD students to disseminate their findings and contribute to the public good. I believe that the potential to have a broader impact through one’s doctoral research makes the PhD experience more fulfilling.
How do you envision connecting your PhD work with broader career possibilities?
My proposed PSI output will demonstrate how research findings through qualitative methods can produce more inclusive housing and urban policies. I believe this skill will be appreciated by non-academic organisations as translation of qualitative empirical evidence into language that can be utilised for policy-making isn’t currently an extensive practice.
How does your research engage with the larger community and social partners?
I will be working closely with research institutions and policy development organisations in India for dissemination of my PSI output.
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree?
Each experience of my life has been shaped by everything that came before it; this has been the case with the decision to pursue a PhD too. While pursuing my undergraduate degree, I became interested in learning more about issues of housing inequalities in urban India. I completed my undergraduate thesis on "chawls", a form of affordable rental housing in Mumbai. My essay on the socio-spatial qualities of a home for destitute women in my hometown Kozhikode was awarded the 3rd prize in the Berkeley Essay Writing Competition that was awarded by the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. My academic interest on the topic paved the way for a job as an architect in the built environment team at SELCO Foundation in Bengaluru upon graduation. Here I worked with low-income migrant communities to develop various affordable housing solutions. I then felt the need to familiarise myself more with housing policies in India and joined the Indian Housing Federation, where my primary role was to conduct research on various affordable housing policies and its implementation across the country. While working with these organisations, I realised that I needed further training to be able to understand the social and political contexts that shape housing inequalities, rather than just the spatial. This is why I decided to pursue my postgraduate degree in City Design and Social Science at the London School of Economics (LSE). I also had the opportunity to work as a research assistant on the "Experiencing Density" project at LSE Cities/LSE London. However, upon completing the degree, I felt the need to further pursue a doctoral degree as a one year postgraduate program was insufficient for me to explore the particular intersection of rental housing, race and gender in urban India.
Why did you choose to come to British Columbia and study at UBC?
Once I decided to pursue my PhD in urban planning, UBC was an obvious choice. The School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) is a world-renowned department in the discipline. My supervisors Dr. Leonora Angeles and Dr. Julia Harten have immense research experience in the fields of urban spatial inequalities and rental housing, and it is to work under them that I decided to study at UBC.
