Search

The enclosure of urban ecological commons into private property has facilitated the growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India. These changes are brought forth through a reworking of communally managed land into narrowly understood public space, which has paved the way for private development. At the helm of Mumbai’s urbanization is a power alliance between state and elite non-state actors across colonial and neoliberal regimes. The process has gravely impacted subsistence and livelihood activities of fisher communities residing in proximity to the development, disproportionately affecting fisherwomen. This paper centers fisherwomen’s urban worlds to analyze the uneven legibility of existing spatial patterns. Across various scales, the categorical and material reworking of land–water commons has reduced resource availability. Women bear a greater, although underrecognized, burden in maintaining lives and livelihoods within this changing landscape. The relative illegibility of fisherwomen’s spaces, however, allows some everyday activities to continue unnoticed despite ongoing processes of enclosure. My analysis of the enclosure of urban ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional feminist and urban political ecology on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and gendered urban environments.

This article illustrates the potential of drawing as a creative method to document and analyse the shifting insider-outsider status of the researcher during fieldwork. I draw on my experiences conducting field-based research at night around outsourced call centres in Mumbai, India, where I examined how women made decisions regarding night-time urban mobility and household social reproduction. While conducting research, I analysed my fluctuating position as an insider or outsider, and how these shifts impacted research dynamics. Furthermore, I relied on boundary-making to alter my relative distance from research participants, thus shaping my positioning on the insider-outsider spectrum. I used hand drawing as a representational technique to document the site, as well as to analyse my positionality within it. This article places feminist methodological insights in conversation with geographic scholarship on drawing to make the following contributions. I show how drawing as a technique can enrich feminist claims about the complex relations between researcher and research participants, challenging a static and dichotomous framing of the researcher as insider or outsider. I also contend that feminist concerns about power dynamics can shape the use of drawing as a critical methodological tool.

Parikh, Aparna. 2018. “Contradictions of neoliberal urbanism in Mumbai, India.” PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University.Feminist scholarship has focused on intimate experiences of marginalized act...

This article focuses on women’s mobility in urban public space in Mumbai, India while working night shifts in outsourced call centres. The outsourced call centre industry is heralded as the...