Biography

Aparna Parikh is a feminist urban geographer who focuses on gendered dimensions of urban environmental belonging in South Asian cities. Her ongoing projects in Mumbai include feminist investigations of urban development schemes, including the formation of night-time landscapes around transnational call centers, coastal road development adjacent to urban fishing communities, and housing challenges in light of authoritarian vegetarianism in India. Her work has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, cultural geographies, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Environment and Planning C, GeoHumanities, Environment and Planning D, and she has chapters in The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender and in Suffragette City: Women, Politics, and the Built Environment.

Project Title: Tracing climates: Feminist indigenous perspectives of Mumbai’s mangrove landscapes

Abstract: Mangroves are poised as a silver bullet solution for climate concerns, an approach that is unable to capture the complex ways mangroves interact with, encroach upon, and rework urban ecologies in ways that sometimes undermine climate goals. Indigenous lifeworlds and knowledge can help address these conundrums and formulate ethical approaches to environmental stewardship and conservation practices. Drawing on participatory visual methods, this project conducts a feminist indigenous reading of mangrove landscapes amid Mumbai’s changing climates. I provide insight into shared absences across endeavors with vastly different environmental visions, and co-develop strategies with indigenous fisherwomen for more inclusive climate governance.