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Ananya Roy
Associate
Dean of Academic Affairs International
& Area Studies 360 Stephens
Hall Associate
Professor & Chair, Urban Studies Department of City & Regional
Planning 228 Wurster
Hall #1850 Fax: 510-642-1641 |
Ananya Roy is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Division of International & Area Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She also serves as Curriculum Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Roy’s home department is the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004). Her current research project is entitled Poverty Experts: Truth and Capital in the New Global Order of Development (Routledge, forthcoming 2008). The project has received several prestigious awards including the Hellman Faculty Award and the Prytanean Faculty Award, the latter being a research and leadership award given to one junior woman faculty member on the UC Berkeley campus each year. Most recently, the project received a research grant from the National Science Foundation. |
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JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS, POLICY BRIEFS, KEYNOTE TALKS
PUBLIC TALKS & ORGANIZATION OF CONFERENCES
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International & Area Studies Ananya Roy serves as Associate
Dean of Academic Affairs for the Division of International & Area
Studies. IAS is home to over 40 research centers & institutes;
undergraduate teaching programs that serve over 500 undergraduates;
graduate teaching programs with almost 150 students; and a substantial
outreach & study abroad infrastructure. At IAS, Roy provides oversight
for the teaching programs: She also serves as co-chair (with Professor Raka Ray) of the Berkeley-India Initiative, which establishes ties between UC Berkeley and Indian universities and organizations to further research and policy. Global Poverty & Practice Minor In 2006, the Blum Center for Developing Economies was established on
the UC Berkeley campus to deepen the engagement of students and faculty
with the pressing issues of poverty, inequality, and development. Ananya
Roy serves as Curriculum Director of the Blum Center and has led the
effort to establish a new undergraduate minor in Global Poverty & Practice. http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu/ The
minor is housed in the International and Area Studies Teaching Program
and governed by a committee of distinguished faculty. Here
are some recent Berkeley news stories about the minor: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2006/09/06_Blum.shtml Urban Studies Along with her colleagues in DCRP, Ananya Roy helped craft and establish the Urban Studies major in 2001-2002. She also chaired this major from 2003 to 2007. The major has 50 students. An additional 80 students complete the City Planning minor each year. Committee Service Ananya Roy currently serves on the following university committees and boards:
Roy's teaching commitments span both the undergraduate and graduate levels of the City and Regional Planning curriculum. Most recently, she is also teaching a new course on Global Poverty, which serves as one of the core courses of the new minor in Global Poverty & Practice. Roy serves on over 40 doctoral committees in City and Regional Planning, Architecture, Environmental Planning, Geography, Sociology, Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, Energy & Resources Group, and Social Welfare. She also serves as an advisor to the joint Master’s in City and Regional Planning and International & Area Studies. In addition, she chairs the M.A. in International & Area Studies. Graduate students in the department have recognized her teaching efforts every year by awarding her honors such as "Teacher of the Year," "Best Seminar of the Year," and "Best Lecturer of the Year." Roy’s current courses include:
Distinguished Teaching Award Ananya Roy is the recipient of a 2006 Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. This is the first time in the 57-year history of DCRP that a faculty member received the award; and the first in the College of Environmental Design in 2 decades. Here is her statement of teaching philosophy: http:/dcrp.ced.berkeley.edu/facbios/Roy/teachingaward.htm Distinguished Faculty Mentorship Award Ananya Roy is also the recipient of a 2006 Distinguished Faculty Mentorship Award. This award is given to UC Berkeley faculty by the Graduate Assembly.
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City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty Roy is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), a book about post-socialist Calcutta. http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/R/roy_city.html A new edition of the book is being released in India in September 2007 by Pearson Publishing. City Requiem advances the following
arguments: |
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Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia Roy is co-editor of a second book, Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia (Lexington Books, 2004, with Nezar AlSayyad). This book develops the themes and issues raised at a Ford Foundation sponsored "Crossing Borders" symposium held at Berkeley in Spring 2001. The symposium and book brought together scholars and policy-makers working in and on Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. Through this cross-regional collaboration, Urban Informality highlights key trends in informal housing in various world-regions. It takes serious account of the current moment of neoliberal globalization and investigates the relationships between neoliberalism and urban informality. It also draws attention to regions such as South Asia and the Middle East, where there are long histories of urban informality and yet not much analytical and theoretical work on these processes. Contributors to the volume include Asef Bayat, Ray Bromley, Alan Gilbert, Arif Hasan, Janice Perlman, Ahmed Soliman, Peter Ward and Oren Yiftachel. Roy inaugurates the book through a prologue/ dialogue with co-editor Nezar AlSayyad. She then contributes two pieces to the volume, "The Gentleman's City: Urban Informality in the Calcutta of New Communism" and "Transnational Trespassings: The Geopolitics of Urban Informality." The latter examines the current policy and design fascination with urban poverty and informality, what Roy calls the "aestheticization of poverty."
JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS, AND POLICY BRIEFS Comparative Urban Studies The study of cities has long been an important component of a liberal-arts curriculum. In the realm of professional fields like planning, urban studies provides the grounded and conceptual knowledge of cities and metropolitan regions that is necessary for researchers and practitioners. In the 21st century, a century in which more people will live in cities than in any other human settlement, much of the urban growth and urbanization will take place in the cities of the global South. Yet, urban studies is a field dominated by theories and concepts generated in the context of EuroAmerican cities: Paris, London, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. "Third World" cities are usually portrayed as "big but powerless" cities, exploding with problems. Roy’s research gives prominence to the cities of the global South, paying attention to their political economy and social structures and highlighting the "lessons learned" from the urban patterns and dynamics of these cities. Selected articles include: |
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 Calcutta, 1997 |
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Roy continues to engage with issues of modernity, drawing upon two analytical tools: feminist theory and the postcolonial debates around multiple/ alternative modernities.
Empire More recently, Roy’s work has taken on the difficult enterprise of examining planning values and ideas in the context of war and empire. Inspired by a collaboration with Master’s students who asked, in Fall 2003, for a special seminar on peace, justice, and planning, Roy has grappled with the question of "praxis in the time of empire." Roy argues that while it is possible to articulate an ethics of disavowal and refusal in the face of war, empire involves much more than war and thus involves difficult ethical questions. When empire encompasses reconstruction, renewal, aid, and democracy, is it possible for planning opt out of this liberal moral order? The paper explores this question through conceptual frameworks ranging from Kant to black cultural studies.
PUBLIC TALKS & ORGANIZATION OF CONFERENCES Roy has organized many conferences and workshops. She is the co-director (with Professor Aihwa Ong) of the SSRC workshop, Inter-Referencing Asia: Urban Experiments and the Art of Being Global, which will be held in Dubai in February 2008. http://www.ssrc.org/program_areas/global/papers/ This workshop looks at how Asian cities produce global urbanism through experiments of inter-referencing whereby urban elites borrow, copy, and articulate city-making across national borders. In the dynamic context of such inter-Asian aspirations, Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai emerge as “models” while aspiring cities undertake slum demolitions, invest in premium urban infrastructure, woo investors through special economic zones, deploy high-style architecture to create an urban brand, and compete for professionals in the bid to create world-class economies. Such a production of space has profound implications for the future of Asian cities: to whom will the city belong? What will be the relationship between cities and citizenship? A few years ago, Roy organized and directed "The City" lecture series at UC Berkeley: http://www.ias.berkeley.edu/southasia/city.pdf Sponsored by the Center for South Asia Studies, the year-long event brought to the UC Berkeley campus luminary speakers whose work draws attention to the actually existing urbanisms of the contemporary world and thereby dislocate the EuroAmerican core of urban studies. In the past few years, Roy has lectured nationally and internationally about her research and theoretical work. She has given talks at the ACSP, AESOP, AAG, ASA, and UAA conferences. She has given invited lectures at MIT, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, Arizona State University, University of Illinois, Chicago, and University of Washington, Seattle. She has led and participated in workshops at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Doha Forum for Democracy and Development, Center for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, and Asia Society, San Francisco. Roy has appeared as a guest on National Public Radio’s show, Forum with Michael Krasny. http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R612210900 She has given commencement addresses for the Division of International and Area Studies, UC Berkeley (2006) and the School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley (2007).
Public health is one of the key issues today in international development. From concerns about the AIDS epidemic to the struggle over livable and healthy cities, development is inevitably associated with matters of health. Recognizing this important trend, since 2001, Roy has collaborated with Dr. Daniel Perlman, formerly of the School of Public Health, to work on an ambitious case-based project that showcases cutting-edge policies and practices. Now entitled The Practice of International Health, this project is a co-edited book, with Daniel Perlman as the primary editor. To be published by Oxford University Press, the text is meant for use in the fields of public health, international development, medical anthropology. While the standard pedagogy of international health is the technical teaching of disease and cure, this book provides knowledge of the political economy and social dynamics that constitute the material and political realities of health policies and programs. Global Poverty The study of contemporary globalization is a well-established field of research, theory, and debate. It is a particularly important field for urban studies and planning since the fate of cities and regions is inextricably linked to global processes. Much of the globalization literature focuses on production capital, finance capital, and property capital. Roy’s new research project takes on the issue of contemporary globalization in a somewhat different manner. It examines development capital, the circuits of accumulation that run through international development institutions like the World Bank, USAID, UN, and that exploding sector, non-governmental organizations or NGOs. The research will be published with Routledge, New York, as a scholarly book tentatively titled Poverty Experts: Truth and Capital in the New Global Order of Development. The book analyzes a "new" paradigm of international development that was put into place in the mid-1990s. Promoted by the World Bank as "Sustainable Human Development," this paradigm focuses on poverty-alleviation, environmental sustainability, and local-level initiatives. Such approaches to development gained momentum in 1999 with the ratification of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which include the ambitious mandate of halving world poverty by 2015. A crucial part of these initiatives has been policies that enable and empower the poor, especially poor women. Microcredit, the practice of giving small loans without collateral to the very poor, is one of the most fashionable of such policies. The book therefore uses microcredit policies as a strategic case-study through which to examine the new global order of poverty management. From fierce lobbying on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. around "microcredit" legislation to G-8 endorsements, microcredit represents the popular and populist face of development. It also represents a lively battle of ideas with sharp disagreements over how poverty is conceptualized, measured, and alleviated. Such debates are sorely lacking in other, more well-behaved, sectors of development. The book examines how authoritative development knowledge is produced in Washington D.C. and how from this node of power best practices, models, conditionalities, and ideas are disseminated and applied worldwide through "global policy chains." At the same time, the book pays careful attention to how this "Washington consensus" is challenged by alternative paradigms, many of them originating in the global South. To this end, the book is located not only in Washington D.C. but also in Bangladesh, the original site of microcredit, home to some of the world’s largest NGOs like the Grameen Bank. Most recently, the project has expanded to include the Middle East where the American war on terror has subsumed within it a war on poverty. This project is concerned with the pragmatics of poverty policies and aims to showcase the successes and limitations of different paradigms of poverty management and alleviation. But it is also a global ethnography, mapping the landscape of policy-making, identifying nodes of power and spaces of resistance and negotiability. It highlights structures of power and influence and addresses the battle of ideas through which policy-making takes place at the global scale. This project has been funded by various generous awards and grants including the Hellman Faculty Award, Prytanean Faculty Award, and the UC Berkeley Committee on Research. Most recently it has received a research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Geography & Regional Science program. |
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