Urvashi Butalia: Cities Imaginaries Lecture 2017

Urvashi Butalia will deliver the third annual Cities Imaginaries lecture at UCL Urban Laboratory, as part of the India Voices season.

You can watch the lecture live below or on the UCLTV YouTube channel.

Mona: A Sort of Life/A Life of Sorts - A Transgender Story in the City

The talk will focus on the story of Mona Ahmed, a hijra, in the city of Delhi. It will unfold through the friendship between two women, and their extended conversations over more than a decade, and will explore issues of urban life, citizenship, marginality and sexuality.

Urvashi Butalia is a feminist author and publisher who co-founded Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house. An active participant in India's women's movement for more than four decades, she is a Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University in Delhi, and is head of Zubaan Books. She has spoken and written widely on issues related to women in India, gender, identity politics, religious fundamentalism, censorship and freedom of expression and issues relating to sexual violence and conflict. Among her various publications is The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, which won the Oral History Book Association Award 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture 2003. Her latest edited collection Partition: The Long Shadow was published in 2015. In 2011, Ms Butalia was awarded the Padmashri, one of India's highest civilian honours.

Cities Imaginaries is a public programme of screenings, salons, exhibitions, performances, workshops and other events that curate and create cultural representations of cities and urban life from the UCL Urban Laboratory. Through this activity strand, artists can interact with UCL and other communities in producing and debating historically-informed radical urban imaginaries for the future. It is led by Urban Lab Co-Director Professor Matthew Beaumont. Two previous annual lectures have been delivered by high-profile cultural figures - Linton Kwesi Johnson (2015/16) and Amit Chaudhuri (2014/15).

Video:

There is wheelchair access into the lecture theatre. For any further accessibility questions or for additional information, please contact Jordan Rowe urbanlaboratory@ucl.ac.uk

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