Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2015 to 2026, she served as founding director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and held the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (1999). There she was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching recognition that the University of California, Berkeley bestows on its faculty. In 2011, Ananya received the Excellence in Achievement award of the Cal Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement award which recognizes her contributions to the University of California and public sphere.
Ananya is a scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development whose research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession and displacement. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial studies, Black studies, and feminist theory, she seeks to shift conceptual frameworks and methodologies in urban studies to take account of the colonial-racial logics that structure space and place. As a researcher, Ananya strives to advance research justice, by which she means accountability to communities directly impacted by state-organized violence. At the very heart of her work is an insistence on the transformation of the public university – through teaching, public scholarship, and community engagement – so that it can be a force for social justice.
Ananya’s books have focused on urban transformations and land grabs in the global South as well as on global structures of finance and development capital. They include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty; Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South, Asia, and Latin America; Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global; Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South; and Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff book award, which recognizes scholarship that advances social justice, for Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development.
Ananya’s most recent book is Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, which builds on a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism. Thinking across Europe and the United States, this work is concerned with the place of racial others in the liberal democracies of the West. At a time of resurgent white nationalism, Beyond Sanctuary foregrounds migrant movements and their imaginations and practices of abolition and decolonization. To learn more, read Ananya’s essay, “Fugitive Sanctuaries,” in Jewish Currents.
Housing justice has been at the center of Ananya’s work for many years now. She led a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, which created a global field of inquiry into housing justice shared by university and movement scholars. Her ongoing scholarship, organized in the form of insurgent research collectives, is concerned with the liberal governance of mass homelessness and has been supported by research foundations such as the Russell Sage Foundation. Along with Robin D.G. Kelley, Ananya currently leads a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning endeavor titled Housing the Third Reconstruction. From Echo Park Lake to Aetna Street, such work centers encampment geographies and poor people’s histories. To learn more, take a look at the digital exhibit, Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake, and watch for the forthcoming book, We Live in Public: Encampments as Resistance and Revolutionary Care in Los Angeles.
Ananya was Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from 2016 to 2020. She is a 2020 Freedom Scholar, an award bestowed by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to scholars who advance social and racial justice. In 2022, Ananya was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Geneva.
Ananya is currently working on a monograph on racial banishment and along with Michele Lancione, editing a book series titled Liberatory Urban with Duke University Press.
Website: https://www.ananyaroy.net/
