About
Project Title
Crip Authorship of Urban Imaginaries: Mobility and the Politics of Knowledge in Urban India
Research Topic
Shivani’s PhD research examines how epistemic practices surrounding urban infrastructures shape experiences and imaginaries of belonging (or lack of it) in the city. Her work is focused on disabled knowledges, about what and how disabled people learn as they move (or don’t) through the world, their experiences with being known (or not) as credible agents, and how knowledges and expertise are shared and created collectively among disabled communities. Smart urban mobility in Mumbai serves as the empirical field, utilizing an evolving conceptual framework of crip theory, intersectionality, and testimonial and hermeneutical injustice to investigate the following:
i. which expectations/assumptions about citizens’ knowledges, resources and abilities are embedded in urban mobility infrastructures,
ii. how dis/abled commuters and workers experience, contest and/or negotiate the epistemic authority of urban mobility infrastructures, and
iii. how the process of creating and maintaining dis/abled knowledge infrastructures can shape imaginaries of belonging in the city.
The research utilises creative, speculative and praxis-based methods, and crip theory is applied as an analytical lens throughout the length of the project to design a research practice that facilitates accessible, inclusive and decolonial processes of knowledge-making and sharing.
Supervisors
Dr Alison Powell and Professor Myria Georgiou
Biography
Shivani holds an MSc in Media and Communications (Research) from the LSE, and a Bachelor of Mass Media (Journalism) from Mumbai University. She is now working as a Research Assistant with Professor Myria Georgiou, supporting research on the use of AI tools in the governance of migration, and climate migration particularly; and as a Subwarden with LSE Residential Life, supporting wellbeing and community building activities for student residents.
Prior to starting her PhD in Data, Networks and Society at the LSE, she worked as the Digital Safety Officer at the University of Edinburgh where she managed the university's digital safety, wellbeing and citizenship awareness initiatives. She has also contributed to projects on media ownership, internet policy, digital human rights, smart cities, digitisation policy, child rights and social media at organisations such as the Digital Futures for Children Centre, LSE; Birkbeck, University of London; the Internet Education Foundation; and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme.
Expertise
Critical disability studies; Crip theory; Cities; Mobilities; Epistemic justice; Creative methods