Vincent DeLaurentis is a critical urban geographer in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He graduated with a BS in foreign service from Georgetown University in 2017. Before beginning his PhD program, Vincent worked as the director of outreach at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitor focused on the apparel industry. At the same time, he developed popular education materials, and also organized tenants through the nonprofit One DC – Organizing Neighborhood Equity.
He studied and researched in Chandigarh for over a decade through two Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Summer Research grants (2025 and 2026), two Critical Languages scholarships (2015 and 2017), and an American Institute of Indian Studies/U.S. Department of Education fellowship (2025). Vincent has presented his research at several platforms: an annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers; a Global Labor University conference; an international conference of Critical Geography; and an annual conference of the journal Historical Materialism. His writing on labor and urban space can be found in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, New Labor Forum, and the Washington Post. Vincent also practices film photography and the sitar.
For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Vincent is studying the ways in which visions of modernity and efforts to create a slum-free city underscore a fundamental friction in Chandigarh’s urban transformation. While the city administration mobilizes abject labor toward Chandigarh’s expansion and maintenance, the city infrastructure neglects laborers’ social and housing needs. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and archival research, Vincent’s project is interrogating worker intervention in the built environment, which takes place both through sanctioned and unsanctioned processes.