2025 Smalley Lecture by Aparajita Santra
"Liminal Publics and Invisible Lives: Exploring the Embodied Spatial Knowledge Production of the 'Maids' of Kolkata, India"
March 13, 2025 | 3:30-5:00pm
"In this talk, I will discuss my dissertation research on the everyday lives of working-class women, specifically domestic workers from informal settlements in Kolkata, India, and shed light on the spatial practices and experiences of mobility/immobility that are differently shaped by their gender, class, caste, occupation, and spatial location in the city. Unequal relations of power and inequalities embedded in the built environment along with forces of colonialism, imperialism, racialization and caste-structures, specific to the context of Kolkata, have historically affected the material dispossessions, vulnerabilities, and violence faced by these women along with their gradual erasure from the urban landscapes.
In this talk, I use a transnational feminist perspective to discuss the different forms of situated spatial knowledges produced by these subaltern women in their mobilities, as they respond to socio-spatial complexities and navigate concerns around safety, respectability, and invisibility/hypervisibility in accessing urban spaces. Further, I will illustrate how these women alter leftover, threshold spaces in the city's fabric and produce spatialities of mutual support and kinship, giving those spaces meaning beyond what they are planned, imagined, or intended for."
Aparajita Santra (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture in the History & Theory track. She is also affiliated with the Women & Gender in Global Perspectives program and the Gender and Women's Studies department. In her research, she uses the lens of intersectionality and spatial justice to understand the placemaking practices of women domestic workers of Kolkata, India.