Host City India: Piscataway

Aayushi Bengani

Ms. Aayushi Bengani is doing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Delhi. Her doctoral research explores urban land management by Indian Railways using ethnographic and archival methods. It builds on her sustained engagement with urban informality through her study and work experiences in Mumbai. These consist of her MA in the School of Media and Cultural Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, her internship with the daily The Indian Express, and her work with development organizations Azim Premji Foundation and YUVA.

A Senior Research Fellow at Delhi School of Economics, Aayushi has consistently presented her research on “vacant” railway lands in Mumbai at eminent urban workshops and conferences globally. These include Urban Theories Across Borders’s Workshop on Researching the Ordinary City, Bangkok and Urban Affairs Association’s International Conference on Urban Affairs, New York, for which she received a fully-funded international travel grant from Indian Council of Social Science Research.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Aayushi is undertaking a comparative study of the railways in the U.S. to understand the current framework of railway land monetization in India. She is analyzing how lands along the railroads in New York City are currently managed and have historically been monetized. Her research aims to provide insights into the changing role of the state with regard to public lands, contributing to the scholarship on land transformation and state-making. Her interest in learning through storytelling drives her in research and otherwise.

Saumya

Ms. Saumya is a doctoral candidate at the National Law University, Delhi. Her interest lies in socio-legal research that examines the intricacies of people’s, especially women’s, engagement with the law in the context of their familial, social, and economic locations. She holds a master’s degree in constitutional law from the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi, where she graduated top of her class. Saumya’s work has appeared in various national and international journals and edited books, including Lexis Nexis and Routledge publications.

Ms. Saumya actively engages with research and awareness work on human rights and women and the law. In 2020, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, to work as a part of the Indian Ministry of Education’s SPARC Project on Law, Gender, and Sustainable Development. She has also served as a resource person for lectures on women and legal rights at the University of Udaipur’s UGC Centre for Women Studies. Having worked as a lawyer in the past, she had the opportunity to observe gender-based power relationships in society up close through cases involving constitutional rights, domestic violence, and labor law violations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Saumya is examining how the low-waged women’s education, personal and socio-economic circumstances, and future goals influence the way they deal with problems at work, and when and how they choose to utilize the legal remedies available to them to raise their voice. The study will not only help her in her doctoral work, but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of gender in employment relations and improve the legal response to the needs and work-life experiences of low-waged women in India.