We are excited to welcome Paroj Banerjee as a new editor of the core collective of editors for City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action. Paroj is an urban ethnographer who deeply engages with urban inhabitation, structural injustice, and non-mainstream experiences of home. Her work explores counter-responses to dispossession and spatial precarity and investigates various forms of urban citizenship.
Currently, Paroj directs MSc programmes at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, where she also leads several enabling functions. Her extensive contributions span scholarship, pedagogy, and practice, as evidenced by her publications in prestigious peer-reviewed journals (Antipode, Journal of Urban History), collaborative and transnational research activities, academic partnerships through engagements such as visiting fellowship at the LSE, and interventions in high-level policy forums such as the United Nations.
Paroj’s research shifts the focus from a Western perspective on poverty and agency, challenging key assumptions about urban inhabitation and the concept of home. She has conducted significant ethnographic research, such as her study on the everyday resilience of footpath dwellers in Mumbai, which highlights the complexities of urban living for those without formal claims to their spaces. Besides India, she has been engaged in action research and knowledge exchange pursuits across the UK, Kenya, Bangladesh, Australia and Brazil.
Her work during the COVID-19 pandemic, in collaboration with housing activists and grassroots communities in the Global South, has uncovered the intensified violence faced by the urban houseless due to dominant discourses of the home. Paroj’s scholarship is inspired by decolonial, anti-racist feminist, and postcolonial perspectives, encompassing disciplines like human geography, urban studies, planning, development studies, and anthropology. She employs diverse methods aimed at both academic and public engagement.
In her role at City, Paroj plans to address the unequal power dynamics in academic knowledge production by promoting underrepresented scholars and reviewers. She is committed to advancing the journal’s dedication to alternative knowledge-sharing methods, such as visual and arts-based approaches, to reach broader audiences and foster collaborations between activists, academics, urban practitioners, and communities. Moreover, Paroj aims to prioritise the Global South as a centre of theoretical innovation, bringing a range of vernacular resources to the journal’s readership.
Paroj’s unique perspective as an early-career scholar, woman of colour, and immigrant adds a valuable dimension to our editorial team. Her motivation aligns with City’s mission to support non-Western scholarship and advocate for radical social transformation. We are thrilled to have her onboard and look forward to her contributions to the journal.
