International Women's Day: 60 Seconds With...Pushpa Arabindoo

Tell us about your role at the University

I am an Associate Professor in Geography and Urban Design at the Department of Geography. I am also the co-convenor of the MSc Urban Studies programme and a co-director at UCL Urban Laboratory.

I have been at UCL since 2008 when I was initially appointed to a joint position between the Department of Geography and the Development Planning Unit at the Bartlett. I have been a full-time member of the Geography department since 2011 where I am also the Postgraduate Taught programmes director for Human Geography.

I am a member of the Global Urbanism research cluster within the department which involves mainly bringing focus to my research on the Indian city of Chennai.

What are your research interests and why are they important?

My research is set in one particular city, Chennai, which I tend to look at for its own sake. I avoid making pleas on its behalf as an understudied city or highlighting its marginal scholarship.

What I try to do is draw on my research in Chennai covering a range of issues from middle-class politics to subaltern activism cutting across planning and politics to explore what it means for broader discourses in urban studies. More recently this has focused on water infrastructure, but it can be anything really.

What inspires you in your work?

It’s the really minor things, the quotidian, that inspires my research, not the grand stuff. I look for ‘street corner’ issues and investigate them in Chennai and, if necessary, scale them up to a broader set of debates.

Often, I feel like ‘there is something happening here that could do with some listening to, there is a story to be told’ and then I am off on an inquisitive ethnographic journey.

What has been your most memorable career moment so far?

A couple of things – when I was awarded the European Union Research in Advanced Studies (EURIAS) fellowship in 2017-18. It allowed me to take a year off and develop my research in a new direction.

I took the time to reflect on what it means to write about the city and I experimented with my writing, not as a style but as a storytelling mode. It led me towards a creative adventure where I collaborated with playwright Nicola Baldwin who had a creative fellowship at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies in 2019-20.

We have recently published an article in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, something I wouldn’t have thought about a few years ago.

What passions/hobbies do you have outside work?

I am a single parent and so-to-speak ‘soccer mom’ at the weekends. It means I accompany my eight-year-old son to every single weekend activity and eventually, I have become a volunteer coach at his local rugby club, Southwark Tigers. I am an avid cricket fan and won’t miss a single notification when an Indian match is on!

Who is your feminist hero?

Oh, there are many – hard to choose. I was inspired by Urvashi Butalia, an Indian author/publisher who came to UCL to give the Cities Imaginaries lecture at the UCL Urban Laboratory in 2017.

I have just started reading Salman Rushdie’s Victory City and I am hooked to his brilliantly crafted female character, Pampa Kampana. Closer to home, since I work on the everyday, almost everyone in my family, from my mother to my aunt and my sister is deserving of the tag 'feminist hero'!