MEET THE TEAM
Vinay Gidwani is an economic geographer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He researches capitalist transformations in South Asia, focusing on the changing dynamics of land, labor, and nature in agrarian and urban settings. His earlier research was on the spatial organization of informal waste economies in Indian cities, and the pivotal contributions of waste workers to urban economies and ecologies. Currently, he involved in two research projects. The first, in collaboration with colleagues at UMN, UCLA, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India and Tarumanagara University, Indonesia, India, and funded by the NSF, probes the actor-networks of real estate and finance capital that are driving housing and infrastructure development in Indonesia and India. The second, funded by the ACLS and AIIS, is a joint undertaking with Professor Priti Ramamurthy (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington-Seattle) and investigates the life-worlds of informal economy migrants in two Indian cities, Delhi and Hyderabad, through oral histories. Vinay is the author of Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Dr. Upadhya is a social anthropologist at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India, where she heads the Urban & Mobility Studies Programme. Her research investigates processes of spatial and social mobility; the globalisation of cities and provincial towns and the urbanisation of rural landscapes in southern India; and skilling, migration, and urban service sector employment. Her earlier research projects included Provincial Globalisation, a study of the social and economic consequences of remittances from international migrants across three regions of India (in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, funded by WOTRO), and a study of labour in the Indian software industry, leading to the publication of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016). In addition to directing the Bangalore component of the Speculative Urbanism project, Dr. Upadhya has conducted research on the politics of development in Amaravati, the new capital city of Andhra Pradesh. She is Co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Development.
Dr. Leitner is a professor of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles. Most of her research has been located in and about cities in different parts of the globe - from immigrants in cities and urban multicultures, urban citizenship, urban development and transformation, urban sustainability and resilience, global urbanism, urban social movements, to urban and socio-spatial theory. She has published (co)authored/edited 5 books including Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice (2019 Sage Publications), Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities (2019 University of Minnesota Press), and Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers (2007 Guilford Press), and teaches undergraduate and courses related to her research interests.
Originally from England and a geographer his entire career, Dr. Sheppard’s scholarly interests range across geographical political economy of a Marxian and post-colonial bent: uneven geographies of capitalist globalization, more-than-capitalist practices, environmental justice, urban land, southern urban theory, social movements, and urban politics. Dr. Leitner and Dr. Sheppard first encountered Jakarta when spending a year there in the mid-1980s, as part of a World Bank-funded curriculum development project at the University of Indonesia. Returning twenty years later, they met local colleagues and identified a shared desire to revalue kampungs as supporting diverse livelihood strategies enabling the urban majority to make lives for themselves in the city. For each of the past six years, they have completed a month of fieldwork in central and peri-urban Jakarta. Dr. Sheppard currently teaches in the Department of Geography at UCLA.
Dr. Goldman teaches in Sociology, Global Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Having conducted ten years of research on the World Bank and the twin projects of green neoliberalism and eco-governmentality, he has been working with colleagues over the past decade conducting research in and around Bengaluru/Bangalore. They have been analyzing the making of this global city and the emergent global project of speculative urbanism, with all of its discontents, forces, contradictions, and imaginaries traversing the domains of Wall Street, platforms of expertise on global urbanism, and the many transformed ecologies and communities in and beyond India.
Mr. Liong is a lecturer at Tarumanagara University (Jakarta), where he also heads the Master’s degree program in Urban and Regional Planning. He has written about community development over time, sustainable housing and architecture, as well as neoliberalism and corporate real estate. He holds degrees from Tarumanagara University and the Asian Institute of Technology.
Mr. Herlambang teaches in Urban Planning and Real Estate at Tarumanagara University (Jakarta). He is a graduate of Diponegoro University and holds master’s degrees from Erasmus University, Rotterdam and Lund University in Sweden. His interests include land use, sustainable development, and urban transformations.