Romola Sanyal
Biographic Data
| ID | 282798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Romola Sanyal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Romola |
| FAMILY NAME | Sanyal |
| SIGNATURE | SANYAL R |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5942-5634 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Space that Refuge Makes: Rethinking Displacements and Protection
Space is foundational to questions of refuge and asylum, but this space is one of conditional hospitality, extended to those deemed worthy of protection by virtue of their victimhood, while physically and discursively excluding others who share similar life circumstances but are deemed unworthy. Space here is understood to be mutually constituted with the social. Hence, refuge is constituted through bodies that are cast out of national belonging,…
Enemy Property: Violence, Dispossession and Citizenship in South Asia
This paper examines the role property plays in the displacement of people and their ongoing and future displaceability and citizenship. It engages with the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the ways in which property was central to how people were rendered displaceable. Building on literature on property, we examine how categorisations of people based on specific attributes affected their rights to property both at the moment of displaceme…
Diasporic scholarship: Racialization, coloniality and de‐territorializing knowledge
In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical scholarship has moved to recognizing how the Global North and South bleed into each other, it frequently c…
Conversions: The emerging informalisation of housing in the Global North
Housing informality in the Global North is becoming an increasingly important topic amongst planners. In this paper, we build on recent debates on informality and planning to highlight forms of housing informality that emerge at the intersection of affordability crises, and capitalism’s new extractivist frontiers through digital platforms. Using the lens of conversions, we show how the flexible transformation of building uses, from commercial to …
Containment from Within: Women Entrepreneurs’ Strategies for Accessing Public Space and Securing Livelihoods in Nairobi during Covid-19 Pandemic
The restrictions limiting social interaction and use of public space in Nairobi during the COVID-19 pandemic have disproportionately affected residents in poor urban communities, who are dependent on using streets, alleyways, and communal areas as extensions of their household spaces to secure livelihoods. This research focuses on how this situation has been handled by women entrepreneurs living in these communities, a group that literature sugge…
Digital informalisation: Rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on ren…
Making urban humanitarian policy: The “neighbourhood approach” in Lebanon
Displaced people are increasingly living in urban areas and humanitarian organisations are rethinking their policies and practices. The ‘Neighbourhood Approach’-an area-based policy model has become globally popular amongst humanitarians. In this paper, I trace its development in Lebanon through a Temporary Technical Committee (TTC) on Neighbourhood Upgrading. Although it failed in being taken up as a distinct policy, aspects of it are being inco…
Displacement: Global conversations on refuge
Law and Refugee Crises
Refugees have an increasing global significance, as their numbers continue to grow and the nature of displacement continues to evolve. Different international, state, and local laws and policies play a part in refugee crises. On the one hand, then, it is important to theorize the role of the law in shaping different formations of displacement; on the other, it is also crucial to address how the people involved in these crises (government official…
Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London
The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hosp…
Managing through ad hoc measures: Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in Lebanon
Short‐term jail, long‐term consequences
A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon
Spectacle and Suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space
Spectacular cities of our time
Slum Tours as Politics: Global Urbanism and Representations of Poverty
In this comment piece on global urbanism, I draw together the politics of representation and the politics of poverty by considering how representations of slums have multiple and varied effects, both entrenching and contesting dominant ideas of urbanism. The Third World megacity has become the icon of underdevelopment, the shorthand for the dysfunction and its alchemic energy, and the recognizable frame through which cities in the global south ar…
Illegal city: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement
Ayona Datta's Illegal City is part of a more recent spate of excellent, critically analytical literature on urbanization and urbanism in India. Over the past decade or so, ethnographically informed
Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement
Refugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under-explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that …
Hindu space: Urban dislocations in post-partition Calcutta
This article explores the relationship between refugees and urban segregation, using Calcutta as a site of analysis. Using interviews and other sources, it shows how refugees displaced Muslims in the process of squatting in the post-partition period. The aims of the article are two-fold. First, it aims to investigate the ways in which refugees, often considered 'victims' of persecution, can in fact become hegemonic forces within the urban environ…
Geographies at the margins: Borders in South Asia-an introduction
Refugees and the City: An Urban Discussion
There has been resurgence in interest in both popular media and academic research on refugees as subjects of incarceration in camps and as a growing population in cities . While the urbanization of refugees is not new, it has become a growing concern for policy‐makers, aid agencies and scholars as the numbers of refugees moving to cities have accelerated. There has been debate over the urbanity of camps due to protracted refugee crises and increa…
Squatting in Camps: Building and Insurgency in Spaces of Refuge
Refugee camps are cast as spaces of exception where the body of the refugee is reduced to bare life. Camps exist at the intersections of multiple layers of governance and legality and remain in a liminal state for generations. The focus on them as spaces of humanitarian intervention often renders them voiceless. Yet, refugees have agency—as is evident through a study of their built environments. The development of refugee camps shows the ways in …
Contesting refugeehood: Squatting as survival in post-partition Calcutta
In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, …
Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement
Refugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under-explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that …
Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London
The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hosp…
A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon
Geographies at the margins: Borders in South Asia-an introduction
Squatting in Camps: Building and Insurgency in Spaces of Refuge
Refugee camps are cast as spaces of exception where the body of the refugee is reduced to bare life. Camps exist at the intersections of multiple layers of governance and legality and remain in a liminal state for generations. The focus on them as spaces of humanitarian intervention often renders them voiceless. Yet, refugees have agency—as is evident through a study of their built environments. The development of refugee camps shows the ways in …
Refugees and the City: An Urban Discussion
There has been resurgence in interest in both popular media and academic research on refugees as subjects of incarceration in camps and as a growing population in cities . While the urbanization of refugees is not new, it has become a growing concern for policy‐makers, aid agencies and scholars as the numbers of refugees moving to cities have accelerated. There has been debate over the urbanity of camps due to protracted refugee crises and increa…
Spectacle and Suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space
Managing through ad hoc measures: Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in Lebanon
Digital informalisation: Rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on ren…
Contesting refugeehood: Squatting as survival in post-partition Calcutta
In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, …
Hindu space: Urban dislocations in post-partition Calcutta
This article explores the relationship between refugees and urban segregation, using Calcutta as a site of analysis. Using interviews and other sources, it shows how refugees displaced Muslims in the process of squatting in the post-partition period. The aims of the article are two-fold. First, it aims to investigate the ways in which refugees, often considered 'victims' of persecution, can in fact become hegemonic forces within the urban environ…
Law and Refugee Crises
Refugees have an increasing global significance, as their numbers continue to grow and the nature of displacement continues to evolve. Different international, state, and local laws and policies play a part in refugee crises. On the one hand, then, it is important to theorize the role of the law in shaping different formations of displacement; on the other, it is also crucial to address how the people involved in these crises (government official…
Making urban humanitarian policy: The “neighbourhood approach” in Lebanon
Displaced people are increasingly living in urban areas and humanitarian organisations are rethinking their policies and practices. The ‘Neighbourhood Approach’-an area-based policy model has become globally popular amongst humanitarians. In this paper, I trace its development in Lebanon through a Temporary Technical Committee (TTC) on Neighbourhood Upgrading. Although it failed in being taken up as a distinct policy, aspects of it are being inco…
Spectacular cities of our time
Slum Tours as Politics: Global Urbanism and Representations of Poverty
In this comment piece on global urbanism, I draw together the politics of representation and the politics of poverty by considering how representations of slums have multiple and varied effects, both entrenching and contesting dominant ideas of urbanism. The Third World megacity has become the icon of underdevelopment, the shorthand for the dysfunction and its alchemic energy, and the recognizable frame through which cities in the global south ar…
Conversions: The emerging informalisation of housing in the Global North
Housing informality in the Global North is becoming an increasingly important topic amongst planners. In this paper, we build on recent debates on informality and planning to highlight forms of housing informality that emerge at the intersection of affordability crises, and capitalism’s new extractivist frontiers through digital platforms. Using the lens of conversions, we show how the flexible transformation of building uses, from commercial to …
The Space that Refuge Makes: Rethinking Displacements and Protection
Space is foundational to questions of refuge and asylum, but this space is one of conditional hospitality, extended to those deemed worthy of protection by virtue of their victimhood, while physically and discursively excluding others who share similar life circumstances but are deemed unworthy. Space here is understood to be mutually constituted with the social. Hence, refuge is constituted through bodies that are cast out of national belonging,…
Contesting refugeehood: Squatting as survival in post-partition Calcutta
In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, …
Squatting in Camps: Building and Insurgency in Spaces of Refuge
Refugee camps are cast as spaces of exception where the body of the refugee is reduced to bare life. Camps exist at the intersections of multiple layers of governance and legality and remain in a liminal state for generations. The focus on them as spaces of humanitarian intervention often renders them voiceless. Yet, refugees have agency—as is evident through a study of their built environments. The development of refugee camps shows the ways in …
Refugees and the City: An Urban Discussion
There has been resurgence in interest in both popular media and academic research on refugees as subjects of incarceration in camps and as a growing population in cities . While the urbanization of refugees is not new, it has become a growing concern for policy‐makers, aid agencies and scholars as the numbers of refugees moving to cities have accelerated. There has been debate over the urbanity of camps due to protracted refugee crises and increa…
Hindu space: Urban dislocations in post-partition Calcutta
This article explores the relationship between refugees and urban segregation, using Calcutta as a site of analysis. Using interviews and other sources, it shows how refugees displaced Muslims in the process of squatting in the post-partition period. The aims of the article are two-fold. First, it aims to investigate the ways in which refugees, often considered 'victims' of persecution, can in fact become hegemonic forces within the urban environ…
Geographies at the margins: Borders in South Asia-an introduction
Illegal city: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement
Ayona Datta's Illegal City is part of a more recent spate of excellent, critically analytical literature on urbanization and urbanism in India. Over the past decade or so, ethnographically informed
Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement
Refugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under-explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that …
Spectacle and Suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space
Spectacular cities of our time
Slum Tours as Politics: Global Urbanism and Representations of Poverty
In this comment piece on global urbanism, I draw together the politics of representation and the politics of poverty by considering how representations of slums have multiple and varied effects, both entrenching and contesting dominant ideas of urbanism. The Third World megacity has become the icon of underdevelopment, the shorthand for the dysfunction and its alchemic energy, and the recognizable frame through which cities in the global south ar…
Short‐term jail, long‐term consequences
A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon
Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London
The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hosp…
Managing through ad hoc measures: Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in Lebanon
Law and Refugee Crises
Refugees have an increasing global significance, as their numbers continue to grow and the nature of displacement continues to evolve. Different international, state, and local laws and policies play a part in refugee crises. On the one hand, then, it is important to theorize the role of the law in shaping different formations of displacement; on the other, it is also crucial to address how the people involved in these crises (government official…
Displacement: Global conversations on refuge
Making urban humanitarian policy: The “neighbourhood approach” in Lebanon
Displaced people are increasingly living in urban areas and humanitarian organisations are rethinking their policies and practices. The ‘Neighbourhood Approach’-an area-based policy model has become globally popular amongst humanitarians. In this paper, I trace its development in Lebanon through a Temporary Technical Committee (TTC) on Neighbourhood Upgrading. Although it failed in being taken up as a distinct policy, aspects of it are being inco…
Containment from Within: Women Entrepreneurs’ Strategies for Accessing Public Space and Securing Livelihoods in Nairobi during Covid-19 Pandemic
The restrictions limiting social interaction and use of public space in Nairobi during the COVID-19 pandemic have disproportionately affected residents in poor urban communities, who are dependent on using streets, alleyways, and communal areas as extensions of their household spaces to secure livelihoods. This research focuses on how this situation has been handled by women entrepreneurs living in these communities, a group that literature sugge…
Digital informalisation: Rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on ren…
Diasporic scholarship: Racialization, coloniality and de‐territorializing knowledge
In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical scholarship has moved to recognizing how the Global North and South bleed into each other, it frequently c…
Conversions: The emerging informalisation of housing in the Global North
Housing informality in the Global North is becoming an increasingly important topic amongst planners. In this paper, we build on recent debates on informality and planning to highlight forms of housing informality that emerge at the intersection of affordability crises, and capitalism’s new extractivist frontiers through digital platforms. Using the lens of conversions, we show how the flexible transformation of building uses, from commercial to …
The Space that Refuge Makes: Rethinking Displacements and Protection
Space is foundational to questions of refuge and asylum, but this space is one of conditional hospitality, extended to those deemed worthy of protection by virtue of their victimhood, while physically and discursively excluding others who share similar life circumstances but are deemed unworthy. Space here is understood to be mutually constituted with the social. Hence, refuge is constituted through bodies that are cast out of national belonging,…
Enemy Property: Violence, Dispossession and Citizenship in South Asia
This paper examines the role property plays in the displacement of people and their ongoing and future displaceability and citizenship. It engages with the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the ways in which property was central to how people were rendered displaceable. Building on literature on property, we examine how categorisations of people based on specific attributes affected their rights to property both at the moment of displaceme…
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)