Priti Narayan
Research Area
Education
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, 2019, PhD
About
My research interests center around urban processes and politics, particularly in India. I write about questions of urban dispossession and belonging, informality of land and labour, and the politics of knowledge production, using ethnographic and archival methods. My work is largely informed by collective struggles for tenure security in Chennai.
A new project aims to narrate the history of the city through the personal and professional histories of women activists. In exploring the methodological possibilities of collaborative activist scholarship, this work will attempt to highlight the scholarly value in the lived experiences of working-class activists and residents as narrated and theorized by them, as well as the potential for scholarly work on and by social movements to influence public discourse. The politics of expertise, feminist methodologies, and public scholarship are of great interest to me.
I frequently collaborate to write about economic and social protections for unorganized workers and urban development in Tamil Nadu. Our/my writing has appeared in news and media outlets such as The Times of India, The Hindu, OpenDemocracy, and Kafila, among others.
Currently, I teach courses focused on urbanization in the Global South, anti-colonial theory, and community-engaged research.
Prior to joining UBC, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. I also have journalistic experience working for The Hindu.
Teaching
Publications
Recent academic publications
2025
Narayan. P. 2025. Slum evictions through the lens of labour: capture, value generation, and belonging in the Indian city. Antipode. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70083
Desai, K. and Narayan. P. 2025. Tracing the contours of care in South Asia: collective care, feminist entanglements and inquiry. Gender, Place & Culture. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2513081
Kalaiyarasan, A. and Narayan. P. 2025. Inclusion through modernity: Dravidian urbanisation in Tamil Nadu state, India. Urban Studies. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251317917
Geetha, R. and Narayan P. 2025. We need a law to protect domestic workers. The Hindu.
Geetha, R. and Narayan, P. 2025. Why the new Master Health Check-Up Scheme for construction workers needs to address the broader issues of occupational health in Tamil Nadu? The Times of India.
Geetha, R. and Narayan. P. 2025. New labour codes rewrite workers’ rights, but here’s where they go wrong. The Times of India.
2024
Narayan.P. and E. Rosenman. 2024. Locating the Public, Dislocating Knowledge Production: An Introduction to Public Economic Geographies for the Twenty-First Century. The Professional Geographer 76(6): 793-796.
Hembrom, R. and Narayan. P. 2024. What It Takes to Be Counted: An Interview with Ruby Hembrom. Meridians 23 (1): 235-258.
Ahmed, Y.M. and Narayan. P. 2024. Why Swachh Bharat is a clean mission, but a dirty job. The Times of India.
2023
Rosenman, E. and Narayan. P. 2023. Economic geography for and by whom? Rethinking expertise and accountability. Dialogues in Human Geography. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231178818
Narayan, P. 2023. Experiments in peripheral urbanization: Building and unbuilding commons in urban India. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41 (1): 130–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775822114873
Geetha, R. and Narayan. P. 2023. Why the new labour codes don’t work for Tamil Nadu. The Times of India.
Geetha, R. and Narayan. P. 2023. Salt workers’ welfare board set up, now needs to step up. The Times of India.
2022
Narayan, P. and E. Rosenman. 2022. From crisis to the everyday: Shouldn’t we all be writing economies? Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54 (2): 392-404. doi: 10.1177/0308518X211068048
Narayan, P. 2021. Review of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas by Radhika Govindrajan. Pacific Affairs 94 (2): 443-445.
Recent media publications
Geetha, R. and Narayan P. 2025. We need a law to protect domestic workers. The Hindu.
Geetha, R. and Narayan, P. 2025. Why the new Master Health Check-Up Scheme for construction workers needs to address the broader issues of occupational health in Tamil Nadu? The Times of India.
Geetha, R. and Narayan, P. 2025. New labour codes rewrite workers’ rights, but here’s where they go wrong. The Times of India.
Ahmed, Y.M. and Narayan, P. 2024. Why Swachh Bharat is a clean mission, but a dirty job. The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2023. Why the new labour codes don’t work for Tamil Nadu. The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2023. Salt workers’ welfare board set up, now needs to step up. The Times of India.
Kalaiyarasan A and Narayan, P. 2022. The growth and limitations of Dravidian urbanism. The Hindu.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2022. Displaced: No place for the poor in cities anymore. The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2022. Salt workers in a soup. The Times of India.
Kalaiyarasan A and Narayan, P. 2022. Challenges to Tamil Nadu’s urban future. The Hindu.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2022. Tamil Nadu women’s draft policy needs to refocus on unorganised sector. The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2021. Can slum resettlement policy make eviction less painful? The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2021. Out of school, this is what kids are doing. The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2021. Did you fire your maid? Here is the untold story. The Times of India.
Geetha R and Narayan, P. 2021. Many holes in laws promising safety net for guest workers. The Times of India.
Awards
SSHRC Insight Development Grant Award, 2023
UBC Partnership Recognition and Exploration (PRE) Fund Award, 2o23 (with Jai Birdi, Chetna Association of Canada)
(As Co-PI) Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) /Operating Grant – HIV/AIDS CBR Program – General – The impact of displacement on health among people living with HIV in Vancouver, Canada.
Hampton New Faculty Research Grant, 2021-23
Graduate Supervision
Varun Panickar, Geography (Advisor)
Koharu Loulou Chayama, Interdisciplinary Studies (Co-advisor with Dr. Rod Knight)
Vadivel Chinnadurai, Geography (Advisor)
Isabella Pojuner, Geography (Co-advisor with Dr. Trevor Barnes)
Please note that I do not plan on taking on additional graduate students for supervision at this time.
Postdoctoral Supervision
Paroma Wagle, 2021-23 (Co-supervisor with Dr. Kavita Philip)
