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Through an analysis of the available literature on women street vendors in the Global South, and then specifically in India, this paper identifies several knowledge gaps and future directions for research. The paper makes three broad claims: (1) street vending spaces are fundamentally gendered spaces; (2) the intersectional identities and caste‐based locations of women street vendors shape their spatial experiences, material realities and access to power; and (3) gender and caste are co‐constituted categories that produce a spatiality unique to the Indian subcontinent. While the geographical approach towards street vending recognises the importance of space and considers vendors as spatial practitioners, vendors are often assumed to belong to a homogenous (male) category with differentials such as gender, race, age, ethnicity and caste invisibilised. This research gap is of even more critical importance in India where caste intersects with gender to produce space. Examining the literature on gender and street vending reveals three broad analytical themes—socio‐spatial disparities, politics of space, and strategies of control. What seems to be missing is a critical, qualitative focus on the experiences of women street vendors, the gendering of vending spaces, the recognition of caste as a dynamic factor, and a spatial analysis grounded in the Southern urban context. Ultimately, this paper makes the case for a situated and postcolonial feminist geography approach to street vending in India, and calls for an intersectional research agenda that is attentive to the co‐constitution of caste and gender in the production of urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle‐class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper‐caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Gujarat Solar Park is an archetype of India's sustainable energy transition. • The solar park is mandated to facilitate 'gender positive' outcomes and boasts female empowerment. • Configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have excluded women from employment opportunities. • Corporate social responsibility schemes designed to empower women reproduced caste and class-based social power asymmetries. • Solar park development in India represents an antinomy of a nature-society relation. India is undergoing a rapid transition to renewable energy; the Gujarat Solar Park typifies this transition. In addition to mitigating climate change, the Gujarat Solar Park boasts female empowerment through social development schemes. This manuscript is inspired by the following research question: To what extent are 'gender positive' processes and projects associated with solar development in India realized on the ground? Utilizing mixed methods fieldwork and drawing on literature from feminist political ecology, this paper demonstrates how the modalities of solar park development represent an antinomy of a nature-society relation. New configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have produced a gendered surplus population of landless peasants who are not absorbed into wage-labor employment in the solar park. Further, associated social development schemes actually disempower women, despite mandates of 'gender positive' outcomes by UN-based climate treaties to which this project is beholden. The opportunity to participate in one such scheme for female empowerment was reserved for only women of middle-to-high class status and those of dominant castes, thereby reproducing class and caste-based social power asymmetries. Female (dis)empowerment eclipses 'gender positive' guarantees of the solar park. This study highlights some unintended consequences of sustainable energy transitions in the Global South at the local scale. Designing development interventions related to climate change mitigation that boast 'gender positive' outcomes must be careful not to exacerbate gender disparities and economic exclusion in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]