Datta, Ayona


Dr Ayona Datta  

Department

Position held

Cities Programme

Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design

Department of Sociology

Experience keywords:

home, migration, and the city; gender, space, and power; spatiality of social agency; critical geographies of architecture; politics of place

Research summary > [Click to expand]

Dr Ayona Datta is Lecturer in the Cities Programme, and co-convenor of the MSc Culture and Society Degree. She has an interdisciplinary background in architecture, environmental design, and gender studies. Her research interests span overlapping and interlinking themes - Gender, space and place; Home, migration, and the city; and critical geographies of architecture. She is investigating these through three research projects.

She recently completed a British Academy Research Grant titled 'Mapping the Architecture of Control and Resistance' which is a qualitative research examining gendered politics among urban squatters in New Delhi. Based on this work, her forthcoming book 'Illegal Geographies of the city: Spatial Politics of Gender and Social Agency in a New Delhi Squatter Settlement', explores the relationships between gender, place, and social agency in squatter settlements of the global South.

Her second research project titled 'Home-building, migration and the city' explores how notions of home and the global city are shaped through the building acts of East European migrant workers arriving in London after EU expansion in 2004.

Her third research project titled 'New communities, new identities: Architecture of California Homes in Izmir, Turkey' explores the critical geographies of luxury housing and their connections with the mobilities of Turkey's global elites along the Izmir-Cesme expressway.

She has published in leading international journals such as Urban Geography; Gender, Place and Culture; Cultural Geographies; Social and Cultural Geography; Environment and Planning A (forthcoming); Antipode (forthcoming); and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (forthcoming).

Sectors and industries to which research relates:

Construction and PropertyCreative Industries and CulturePolicy and Regulatory Bodies

Countries and regions to which research relates:

Izmir; Phoenix; London; New Delhi

Languages:

Bengali [Spoken: Fluent, Written: Fluent]; Hindi [Spoken: Fluent, Written: Fluent]

Media experience:

TV

Contact Points

LSE phone number:

+44 (0)20 7955 6828

Publications

The following references are sourced from LSE Research Online|. References that are linked lead to the full text.

2012

Datta, Ayona (2012) ‘Where is the global city?’: visual narratives of London among East European migrants. Urban studies, 49 (8). pp. 1725-1740. ISSN 0042-0980

Datta, Ayona (2012) “Mongrel City”: cosmopolitan neighbourliness in a Delhi squatter settlement. Antipode: a radical journal of geography, 44 (3). pp. 745-763. ISSN 0066-4812

2011

Brickell, Katherine and Datta, Ayona (2011) Introduction. In: Brickell, Katherine and Datta, Ayona, (eds.) Translocal geographies: spaces, places, connections. Ashgate, London, UK, pp. 3-20. ISBN 9780754678380

Brickell, Katherine and Datta, Ayona, (eds.) (2011) Translocal geographies: spaces, places, connections. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK. ISBN 9780754678380

Datta, Ayona (2011) Translocal geographies of London: belonging and otherness among Polish migrants after 2004. In: Brickell, Katherine and Datta, Ayona, (eds.) Translocal geographies: spaces, places, connections. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Farnham, Surrey, UK, pp. 73-92. ISBN 9780754678380

2010

Datta, Ayona (2010) Illegal geographies of the city: slums in Delhi’s worldly aspirations. Dérive: Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, 40 pp. 89-93. ISSN 1608-8131

Hall, Suzanne and Datta, Ayona (2010) The translocal street: shop signs and local multi-culture along the Walworth Road, South London. City, culture and society, 1 (2). pp. 69-77. ISSN 1877-9166

2009

Datta, Ayona (2009) Making space for muslims: housing Bangladeshi families in East London. In: Phillips, Richard, (ed.) Muslim spaces of hope. Zed Books, London. ISBN 9781848133006

Datta, Ayona (2009) ‘This is special humour’: visual narratives of Polish masculinities in London’s building sites. In: Burrell, Kathy, (ed.) After 2004: Polish migration to the UK in the ‘new’ European Union. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, pp. 189-210. ISBN 9780754673873

Datta, Ayona (2009) Places of everyday cosmopolitanisms: East-European construction workers in London. Environment and planning A, 41 (2). pp. 353-370. ISSN 0308-518X

Datta, Ayona (2009) Home, migration, and the city: spatial forms and practices in a globalising world. Open house international, 34 (3). pp. 4-7. ISSN 0168-2600

Datta, Ayona and Brickell, Katherine (2009) ‘We have a little bit more finesse as a nation': constructing the Polish worker in London's building sites. Antipode: a radical journal of geography, 41 (3). pp. 439-464. ISSN 0066-4812

2008

Datta, Ayona (2008) Building differences: material geographies of home(s) among Polish builders in London. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33 (4). pp. 518-531. ISSN 1475-5661

Datta, Ayona (2008) Architecture of low-income widow housing: ‘spatial opportunities’ in Madipur, West Delhi. Cultural Geographies, 15 pp. 255-260. ISSN 1474-4740

Datta, Ayona (2008) Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field. Gender, place and culture: a journal for feminist geography, 15 (2). pp. 189-204. ISSN 0966-369X

2007

Datta, Ayona (2007) Samudayik Shakti: working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp, New Delhi. Gender, place and culture, 14 (2). pp. 215-231. ISSN 0966-369X

Datta, Ayona and Yucel Young, Sebnem (2007) Suburban development and networks of mobility : sites in Izmir, Turkey. Global built environment review, 6 (1). pp. 42-53. ISSN 1474-6832

Datta, Ayona (2007) Gender and learning in the design studio. Journal for education in the built environment, 2 (2). pp. 21-35. ISSN 1747-4205

Datta, Ayona (2007) Book review: colonial and post-colonial geographies of India. Singapore journal of tropical geography, 28 (3). pp. 374-375. ISSN 0129-7619

2006

Datta, Ayona (2006) From tenements to flats: gender, class and modernisation in Bethnal Green Estate. Social and cultural geography, 7 (5). pp. 789-805. ISSN 1464-9365

Datta, Ayona (2006) Book review: the code of the city: standards and the hidden language of place making. Open house international, 31 (1). pp. 112-113. ISSN 0168-2601

Datta, Ayona (2006) Book review: designing social innovation: planning, building, evaluating. Open house international, 31 (2). pp. 87-89. ISSN 0168-2601

2005

Datta, Ayona (2005) Book review: challenge of the slums: global report on human settlements. Open house international, 30 (1). pp. 96-97. ISSN 0168-2601

Datta, Ayona (2005) Homed in Arizona: the architecture of emergency shelters. Urban geography, 26 (6). pp. 536-557. ISSN 0272-3638

2004

Datta, Ayona (2004) Homelessness : a cross-cultural perspective. Open house international, 29 (2). pp. 3-5. ISSN 0168-2601

2001

Datta, Ayona (2001) The most wonderful place in the world: homeless women’s experiences in a Phoenix shelter. Open house international, 27 (3). pp. 38-46. ISSN 0168-2600

2000

Datta, Ayona and Baker, Nick (2000) Carbon dioxide emissions from the housing sector: possible scenarios for the UK. In: Steemers, Koen and Yannas, Simos, (eds.) Architecture, city, environment. Earthscan, London, pp. 204-209. ISBN 9781902916163

LSE Research Online is the primary resource for references to publications. For queries or updates please email the LSE Research Online team at lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk|.

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Personal website

This book argues for a spatial understanding of translocality that situates the migrant experience within/across particular 'locales' without confining it to the territorial boundedness of the nation state.

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Awards

2009-2010 ESRC-ICSSR India-UK Scholar Exchange Award; 2009-2010 European Science Foundation Conference Grant; 2006 New Researcher Grant from Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines; 2005 British Academy Small Research Grant

 

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