Pursuing a PhD degree

Research Areas: Urbanisation in the Global South; Urban political ecology; Power, Colonialism, Justice; Cities, Economies, Transnational Flows.

Supervisor: Dr Priti Narayan

Degrees: MSc. Ecology and Environment Studies, Nalanda University (2019); B.E. Mechanical Engineering, Anna University, Chennai (2016).

Entry Date: 2023

Research Statement: 

For my doctoral studies, I would like to take up the case of political ecologies of urban riverscapes in the Global South. My proposed research centres around the governance of urban river bodies and the urban poor in Chennai, a metropolitan city in South India, through the lens of urban political ecology. I contend that the large-scale developmental interventions, in its new avatar of eco-restoration projects in Chennai, are creating uneven environmental geographies by putting the marginalised sections of the city in peril. I am interested in understanding how these transformations create variegated environmental subjectivities among the dispossessed poor and shape their potential for resistance.