Womxn in Design‘s fifth annual International Womxn’s Week convenes a weeklong series of events that gathers members of the Harvard GSD community and beyond to celebrate and cultivate new ways of thinking about gender and power. In March 2021, the International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address and subsequent events will explore the theme of GRASSROOTS.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which advances scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Ananya’s work has focused on urban transformations and land grabs as well as on global capital and predatory financialization. With enduring theoretical commitments to postcolonial critique, feminist thought, and the Black Radical Tradition, she refuses the whiteness of canons of knowledge, forging theory and pedagogy attentive to historical difference. Ananya’s current research is concerned with “racial banishment,” the expulsion of working-class communities of color from cities through racialized policing and other forms of state-organized violence. She leads a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities and a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism. Ananya was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2020.

Follow Ananya Roy on Twitter at @ananyaucla, and follow the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at @challengeineq.