Research projects and conference presentations

Bandi nadapadam nerchuko bidda, emaina cheyachu [learn how to drive the vehicle my girl, then you can do 
anything], is a statement that I heard often growing up in Hyderabad, India. For women in cities of the Global South, everyday physical mobility is a necessary means for upward social mobility. Transportation, the physical infrastructure that moves people, is the social infrastructure that facilitates or impedes opportunity, equity, and empowerment for women. In the geoeconomic ambitions of the Global City, transportation is an important marker of modernization, and women sit symbolically at the center of these visions. Existing research from India, and my own previous findings demonstrate that women are very aware of the importance of everyday transportation in their lives. The capital city of the newest democratically formed state of Telangana in South India, Hyderabad, popularly called the “next Silicon Valley'' by Indian media, is experiencing a large-scale feminization of the workforce in the Information Technology (IT) sector, which is spatially clustered in the North-West region of the city aptly called: Cyberabad. The Telangana minister of Urban Development recently announced the ‘Three Is’ - Innovation, Infrastructure, and Inclusive Growth - as the guiding vision for economic development in the State. This project focuses on the political subjectivity of the people at the core of this vision, ‘techie-women,’ the colloquial term for women working in IT, who are often the object of urban development narratives and policies of progress, but rarely subjects of their own voice and making. This research project aims to understand techie-women’s perceptions of how they are politicized as part of the transportation infrastructure development in Hyderabad. This project will put techie-women in conversation with the state and assess whether their perceptions of themselves, their mobility, their transportation, and relationship to broader visions of urban change align with the public and political discourses of the state. Very few studies examine how women, as the symbolic markers of urban progress and transportation development campaigns, understand themselves in relation to urban politics of mobility and transportation within a Global Southern hi-tech city vision. Studying transportation infrastructure in light of the global, national, and local politics of Hyderabad will lead to a host of theoretical and practical insights that bring attention to the duality of being a woman in a South Asian city: privileged and marginalized, economically mobile and culturally constrained. It contributes to theoretical debates on feminist urban political geographies along with practical design and planning suggestions. The proposed doctoral research project asks: What is the relationship between women 
and everyday transportation infrastructure in Hyderabad? Through two research questions: 

RQ1: What are the political narratives and public discourses about women and transportation development in Hyderabad? Answered through thematic and discourse analysis of semi-structured key informant interviews; archival data from select newspapers, public speeches, government websites; and participant observations.

RQ2: What are the social perceptions of techie-women about the ways that the state’s urban transportation infrastructure projects incorporate them and their mobility? Answered through Q factor, thematic, and participatory analysis using Q-sorting, and in-depth interviews.