This month we continue our series of posts aimed at presenting the most recent research developments of the Lab’s Core Team. We are going to feature all of our researchers who are working as part of the ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing (IRH) project, the FARE Precarious Housing in Eastern Europe project, or who are pursuing their own individual Marie-Curie or USF fellowships.
We continue with Syeda Jenifa Zahan, a recent Urban Studies Foundation Fellow at the Lab.
Dr. Syeda Jenifa Zahan is a feminist and postcolonial urban studies scholar whose work focuses on intersectional relations of power, practices and politics of urban dwelling and structural violence of urbanisation in the Global South. Since the award of her PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2020, Jenifa has been developing a unique intellectual practice that contributes to theory building, urban practices at structural and grassroots levels, and development of innovative methodologies.
In 2022, Jenifa was awarded the Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship as the Principal Investigator, which ended in February 2025. Post-fellowship, Jenifa is continuing to remain part of the Lab and to develop her work in Turin.
The USF research, based at DIST, Politecnico di Torino, was titled “The politics of smart urbanism: How smart housing is (re)structuring power in urban India” and investigated how smart interventions in the housing sector are leading to new forms of governance practices and consolidation of intersectional power relations in Delhi, India.
Locating smart housing within broader historical and geographical trajectories of urban and housing developments, Jenifa analyses entrenched and new geographies of socio-economic and political power in and through smart urban housing. Jenifa’s research draws on longitudinal, community engaged and creative ethnographies of urban processes and structures as well as everyday life and embodied knowledge, focusing mostly on Indian cities.
Recent publications
- Zahan, S. J. (2024). Dwelling in the city: Socio-spatial dynamics of gendered and religious embodiment of young Muslim women in Delhi, India. City, Culture and Society, 36, 100563.
- Zahan, S. J. (2024). ‘Delhi is a hopeful place for me!’: young middle-class women reclaiming the Indian city. Gender, Place & Culture, 31(2), 176-195.
- Zahan, S.J. (2023). Decolonising the Indian university (?): geographies of gendered living, control and resistance. Space and Society+.
Picture: Steets of Delhi. Photo by: Syeda Jenifa Zahan.