Ananya Roy

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Ananya is a scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development whose research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession and displacement. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial studies, Black studies, and feminist theory, she seeks to shift conceptual frameworks and methodologies in urban studies to take account of the colonial-racial logics that structure space and place. As a researcher, Ananya strives to advance research justice, by which she means accountability to communities directly impacted by state-organized violence. At the very heart of her work is an insistence on the transformation of the public university – through teaching, public scholarship, and community engagement – so that it can be a force for social justice.

Ananya’s most recent book is Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, which builds on a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism. Thinking across Europe and the United States, this work is concerned with the place of racial others in the liberal democracies of the West. At a time of resurgent white nationalism, Beyond Sanctuary foregrounds migrant movements and their imaginations and practices of abolition and decolonization.

Housing justice has been at the center of Ananya’s work for many years now. She led a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, which created a global field of inquiry into housing justice shared by university and movement scholars. Her ongoing scholarship, organized in the form of insurgent research collectives at the Institute, is concerned with the liberal governance of mass homelessness and has been supported by research foundations such as the Russell Sage Foundation. From Echo Park Lake to Aetna Street, such work centers encampment geographies and poor people’s histories. Ananya is currently working on a monograph on racial banishment, the expulsion and social death of working-class communities of color through racialized policing and other forms of dispossession.

Ananya is a 2020 Freedom Scholar, an award bestowed by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to scholars who advance social and racial justice. In 2022, Ananya was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Geneva. Along with Robin D.G. Kelley, she currently leads a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning endeavor titled Housing the Third Reconstruction.