Syeda Jenifa Zahan

Dr. Syeda Jenifa Zahan is an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at DIST, Politecnico di Torino, Italy, working in close collaboration with the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. Jenifa is a feminist urban geographer with a strong research record in urban ethnographies, intersectional analyses of socio-spatial inequalities, and resistances in Indian cities. Her research draws on feminist, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, and centralises critical, multi-method, longitudinal ethnographies in India. Jenifa is currently completing her Urban Studies Foundation Fellowship as a Principal Investigator. Her project titled “The politics of smart urbanism: how smart housing is (re)consolidation power in urban India” analyses urban justice implications of smart urbanism and resilient-city interventions in the housing sector in Delhi, India. Analysing socio-technical, institutional and affective dimensions of smart and resilient-city interventions her work contributes to science and technology studies, critical urban studies, and feminist and postcolonial urban perspectives. Academic outputs arising from this research are currently under review/revision. In October 2024, Jenifa convened an international workshop titled “Beyond smart city transitions: structural violence of smart urbanism” at Politecnico di Torino. This workshop brought together early-career scholars from the Global South and a keynote by Prof. Gillian Rose, University of Oxford. Jenifa holds a PhD in Geography (2020) awarded by the National University of Singapore.