The Center for South Asian Studies is delighted to welcome our newest EC member, Pallavi Gupta, who joins us this semester as Instructor in the Department of Geography at UH Mānoa.
Pallavi will give a talk titled “Caste, Capitalism, and the (Re)production of Clean Urban Spaces: Notes from Indian Railway Stations.”
Room No: 443 Saunders
Date and Time: Thursday, August 31, 12:00 noon
Pallavi received her PhD in Geography with a Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies in 2023 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also holds an MA in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and a BA in Law from ILS Law College of Pune University.
She writes: “I am a feminist political geographer, committed to studying how hierarchies are created within human societies. Over ten years of working with leading feminist non-profits and community-based organizations in India, I am deeply engaged with questions related to non-discrimination, gender, and social justice. As a practitioner, along with my team members, I anchored gender-justice programs for diverse audiences including lawyers, corporate employees, young students, security personnel, and employees of nonprofits. I have formal training in law, social work, and geography, and, in my current work, critically examine the experiences of cleaning workers in India.
My research spans the disciplines of labor, legal, feminist, and political geographies and draws upon frameworks from Black Studies, Dalit Studies, and Infrastructure Studies. In doing so, it examines how space, political economy, and social structures combine to exacerbate the experience of discrimination for marginalized groups. In my doctoral work, I engaged with these questions through a case study of the Indian Railways, using extensive qualitative methods among cleaning workers in Hyderabad, India. My dissertation chapters have been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Annals of the American Association of Geographers.”
Please join us in welcoming Pallavi to UH Mānoa!