Bartlett Research Conversations: Fathima Zehba Maanjeri Puthusery and Sarah Akigbogun

A hybrid Teams link is available – please contact Emmy Thittanond, g.thittanond@ucl.ac.uk, to request access to the link by midday, Tuesday 19 Novemberr 2024.

Unpacking the Everyday Journey: Factors Shaping Women Workers’ Mobility in Kochi, India

Speaker: Fathima Zehba Maanjeri Puthusery (visiting research student to The Bartlett School of Architecture)
UCL Supervisor: Dr Lakshmi Priya Rajendran

Abstract

Women often make more complex travel patterns due to their diverse gender roles and face significant disadvantages in urban environments. The disparity results in women not benefiting equally from urban amenities and services compared to their male counterparts. This study investigates the barriers to women's mobility in urban areas, focusing on Kochi city in Kerala, India. In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 women workers to capture the issues embedded in their socio-cultural settings and personal beliefs and experiences. A thematic content analysis was carried out to identify and prioritise the factors, both intrinsic (individual attributes such as age, income, employment status, marital status) and extrinsic (spatial and urban planning attributes such as residing location, public transport availability and affordability, gender-inclusive design features, safety features, etc.). The study offers interesting insights into the implicit yet critical relationship and interplay of socio-spatial factors that affect women workers’ everyday mobility in cities.

Beyond Urban Tragedy – A Home for Antionette

An allegorical approach to exploring Race, Gender, Architecture and the City. Using storytelling, film and performance to illuminate experiences of spaces of Oppression and Liberation.

Speaker: Sarah Akigbogun
Supervisors: Professor Penelope Haralambidou and Dr Fiona Zisch 

Abstract

In 1966 Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, a backstory to ‘the madwoman in the attic’, Bertha, from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Renaming her Antionette, Rhys’s, post-colonial critique explores themes of power, gender, race and not belonging. It looks at West African and Caribbean history, double consciousness (W.E.B Du Bois, 1903), madness and architecture. We see space used as a tool to confine a woman, her mind and arguably the traces of Black culture, she grew up surrounded by. Similar themes of patriarchy verses women, and the use of space as a means of control are found in Sophocles Antigone.

 Using movement psychology, this research takes an allegorical approach to exploring inner worlds as the interact with the material of architecture and the power relations which surround it.  Arguing that in the contemporary urban landscape, where people of colour have well-documented, poorer health mental outcomes (Golembiewski, 2017), and where architecture has disproportionately been used to confine women (Appignanesi, 2010) we see echoes of classical tragedy. Tragedy which is compounded by historiographies which erase all but a few.

 Imagining into the void, it searches for diasporic memory, using film, performance, drawing and writing, it seeks to disrupt these narratives and create counter histories and spatial futures.

 Foucault argues that architecture has no inherent agency (1982) that  it not is ‘possible to say that one thing is of the order of “liberation” and another is of the order of “oppression’. This thesis argues that architecture is not so innocent.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the Programme Directors, Professor Sophia Psarra, Dr Tania Sengupta and Dr Nina Vollenbröker; PhD Coordinators, Dr Stamatis Zografos and Dr Stelios Giamarelos; and other PhD supervisors.

Image: Mnemic House 2 - Beyond Urban Tragedy by Sarah Akigbogun