"Learning from and accountable to movements and communities on the front lines of dispossession and displacement, I seek to unravel the relationship between property, personhood, and police, which is a key structuring logic of racial capitalism, and its life-long companion, liberalism."
Ananya Roy is a Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography, The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy and inaugural Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Roy’s work has focused on urban transformations and land grabs, as well as global capital and predatory financialization, with a focus on poor people’s movements. She is the author of multiple books, including Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development and most recently Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial critique, femenist thought, and critical race studies, her research and scholarship challenge the whiteness of canons of knowledge, forging theory and pedagogy attentive to historical differences.
Encountering Poverty challenges mainstream frameworks of global poverty by going beyond the claims that poverty is a problem that can be solved through economic resources or technological interventions.
Based on many years of research in Washington D.C., Bangladesh, and the Middle East, Poverty Capital also grows out of the author's undergraduate teaching to thousands of students on the subject of global poverty and inequality.
What to learn more about the Freedom Scholars?
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE FREEDOM SCHOLAR AWARDS HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY THE INATAI FOUNDATION.
