Syeda Jenifa Zahan

Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow at the Polytechnic of Turin

syeda.zahan@polito.it

Dr. Syeda Jenifa Zahan is an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow at the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Jenifa is a feminist urban geographer working on Indian and South Asian cities. Her research interests lie in the areas of geographies of power, gendered violence and (in)security, intersectional power relations and marginality, and urban governance in South Asia. Jenifa has a PhD (2020) from the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, where she focused on gendered violence and discrimination against young, single, middle-class women in public spaces of Delhi, India. Jenifa takes multi-method, multi-scalar ethnographic approaches to her research. Jenifa has published her research in peer-reviewed journals such as: Space and Polity, Journal of the British Academy and Gender, Place and Culture (forthcoming). At the Politecnico di Torino, Jenifa will work on smart housing developments and how these developments engender new forms of governance and (re)consolidation of power in urban India with a special focus on Delhi, in close collaboration with the Beyond Inhabitation Lab.

Selected publications

Zahan, SJ (2022, open access) “Smart urbanism and the politics of redevelopment in urban peripheries in India”, Urban Matters Journal, SI: Imagining/Doing Smart City. Institute of Urban Studies, Malmo University, available here.

Gupte, J and Zahan, SJ (2021) “Silent cities, silenced histories: Subaltern Experiences of Everyday Urban Violence during COVID-19”, Journal of the British Academy, 9(s3), 139-155.

Zahan, SJ (2020) “Feminist politicization of the urban: Young female students challenging spatial patriarchies”, Space and Polity, 24(1), 45-59.


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