Yasminah Beebeejaun
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591966 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yasminah Beebeejaun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yasminah |
| FAMILY NAME | Beebeejaun |
| SIGNATURE | BEEBEEJAUN Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4744-0751 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Diasporic Spaces of Conviviality and Domesticity: On the Political Significance of Kitchens in Post-War Britain
My intervention starts at the site of the kitchen, a space that remains often understood as a private site of gendered domestic labour. In this article, I examine how the British modernized post-war kitchen became valorized as a sphere of women’s labour. The ‘ideal kitchen’ reinscribed raced and gendered ideas about the family. For incoming Black and South Asian families, the inferiority of sub-standard housing, facilitated by the de facto colour…
Building caring communities: A special issue in honor of Janet L. Smith
Temporalities of cemeteries: The tensions and flows of perpetuity and change in ‘slow’ places
Cemeteries in the UK and Ireland are typically viewed as a final ‘place of rest’ for the deceased where their remains will not be disturbed. This sense is at least in some part created by the norm of in-perpetuity grave rights in these countries. Yet while ‘in-perpetuity’ suggests fixity, it is defined and managed in varying ways in different settings, including an ultimate fixed term for some graves and cemeteries. Over decades, in-perpetuity ce…
Regarding Statues: Whiteness, Space, and the Postcolonial European Imagination
In recent years, there have been renewed calls to remove colonial statues in many European cities. The increased politicization of colonial heritage has become a matter of concern to urban planning as heritage disputes have erupted over the presence of specific statues and other monuments. In this paper, I argue that the retention of colonial statues is a racially charged political act that reinforces the white domination of space. I draw on crit…
Hindu Mobilities and Cremation: Minority, Migrant and Gendered Dialogues and Dialectics in English and Welsh Towns
In Chap. 1 Avril Maddrell, Brenda Mathijssen, Yasminah Beebeejaun, Katie McClymont and Danny McNally untangle the embodied, gendered, racialised and institutionalized cremation practices of Hindu communities in three case study towns: Northampton and Swindon in England and Newport in Wales. They argue that attending to questions of (in)adequate funerary infrastructure and norms – including prompt cremation; accommodating ritual requirements for w…
Cemeteries and crematoria, forgotten public space in multicultural Europe. An agenda for inclusion and citizenship
In western Europe, municipal or otherwise state‐commissioned cemeteries and crematoria are public spaces and services, open to all. Cemeteries and crematoria grounds are neglected in geographical, planning and policy debates about the character, design, management, use and accessibility of public spaces, and likewise debates about the social inclusion of migrants and minorities. This may reflect a tendency to situate cemeteries socially and geogr…
Diverse teams researching diversity: Negotiating identity, place and embodiment in qualitative research
Fieldwork encounters are not only contingent to biographical subjectivities, but are mediated by a confluence of identity, place and embodiment. This paper offers reflexive accounts of researchers with various socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, who collaborated as a team to examine the varied funerary experiences and needs of established minorities and recent migrants in England and Wales. Focusing on the researchers' varied personal ex…
Europe and the people without planning: Reconsidering British interventions in colonial Hong Kong
The commissioning of a plan by Patrick Abercrombie for British Hong Kong in 1947 is the entry point to explore claims of ‘benevolent colonialism’. Through an engagement with British colonial attitudes towards the majority Chinese population, we can critically re-evaluate claims that British planning brought a more enlightened form of urbanism. Instead, we find colonial inaction and a marked difference in housing and development standards based la…
An invitation to discourse on race, ethnicity and the city
Whose diversity? Race, space and the European city
European cities have increasingly highlighted diversity as a marker of their progressive status. A growing field of research argues that “super-diverse” neighborhoods exemplify a normalization of ethnic and racial difference as a positive facet of everyday life. However, contemporary manifestations of urban diversity cannot be disentangled easily from the European colonial legacy that underlies a series of racial and spatial imaginaries. I argue …
Race, Gender, and Positionality in Urban Planning Research
Reflexivity within planning research has emerged as central to a series of epistemological and methodological debates. There has been less discussion, however, about how research positionalities might intersect with assumptions regarding gendered and raced identities. Writing from within the field of urban planning I consider how a pervasive inattentiveness to the racial and gendered dynamics of the wider field obscures the articulation of the co…
Rules, Norms and Practices – A Comparative Study Exploring Disposal Practices and Facilities in Northern Europe
We identify and analyse practices and management regimes around burial and handling of ashes across eight case study towns within six Northern European countries. We analyse management of cemeteries and crematoria gardens, majority practices and provision for minority communities, including various burial types, cremated remains, the re-use of graves, and costs for interments. Comparative data is drawn from analysis of national and local regulati…
Fracking and epistemic injustice: A feminist critique of knowledge formation
The expansion of fracking, an intensive form of hydrocarbon extraction, has been met with increasing public hostility, spanning a diverse range of interests and political allegiances. However, to date, few authors have engaged with the role of gender and women activists. In this paper, I consider how gender and gendered ideas have been used as a resource to underpin fracking protests in the USA and UK. I find that a problematic gendered binary ha…
Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power
This paper takes the development of the British town planning movement as its starting point to explore a series of challenges for the discipline’s historiography. The emergence of the professional field involved the circulation of ideas beyond the metropolitan core to colonial territories with spatial interventions that were deemed both physically and morally beneficial. The paper explores the role played by the discipline in developing spatiali…
Death in the Peripheries: Planning for Minority Ethnic Groups beyond “the City”
“Deathscapes” constitute a growing field of research, yet the topic remains widely neglected within urban planning. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of existing provision for death, remembrance, and the disposal of body remains for ethnic minority groups living in four British towns: Huddersfield, Newport, Northampton, and Swindon. The paper argues that the failure of contemporary planning policy and practice to address the intersections be…
Intersections of (infra)structural violence and cultural inclusion: The geopolitics of minority cemeteries and crematoria provision
Building on embodied and de‐colonial approaches to geopolitics, this paper examines the relationship between forms of governance in municipal cemetery and crematorium provision and the needs of established minorities, arguing that inadequate infrastructure and services can constitute harm. Crucially, it is contended that forms of governance impact not only on the living, but also on perceptions of the wellbeing of the dead. Grounded in a study of…
Race, ethnicity and the city
We write this editorial as the founding editors of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City. The launch of the journal takes place in the midst of a global pandemic and ongoing widespread protes
Exploring the intersections between local knowledge and environmental regulation: A study of shale gas extraction in Texas and Lancashire
Contemporary shale gas extraction, also known as ‘fracking’, has become one of the most contentious environmental issues facing Europe and North America. Academic and policy debates have hitherto focused principally on questions related to scientific disputes, risk perception, potential health impacts, and the wider economic and geo-political dimensions to energy security. This paper draws on extensive qualitative research in Texas and Lancashire…
Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life
Gender remains a neglected focus for theory and practice in shaping cities. Given women’s continuing economic and social marginalization and the prevalence of violence against women, how can this be the case? Despite several decades of feminist scholarship, dominant perspectives within the “the right to the city” literature pay little attention to how “rights” are gendered. In contrast, feminist and queer scholarship concerned with everyday life …
Is the ‘New Deal for Communities’ a New Deal for Equality? Getting Women on Board in Neighbourhood Governance
Across the EU, neighbourhoods have been the focus for achieving social cohesion and reducing social exclusion. Neighbourhood renewal and community involvement were central themes in the UK Labour government’s urban policy. This article focuses on the challenge of community engagement given the heterogeneity of individuals and neighbourhoods. It uses the case study of a New Deal for Communities (NDC) partnership to explore the experiences of diffe…
Informalizing Participation: Insights from Chicago and Johannesburg
This paper argues that formal participation in planning remains simplistic and enhances community conflict. The increasing diversity of the public makes traditional forms of representation increasingly problematic. There is a need to situate formal participation within increasingly informal forms of participation between state and citizens. Qualitative research in Chicago and Johannesburg illustrates the difficulties caused by formal participatio…
City centre masterplanning and cultural spaces: A case study of Sheffield
Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life
Gender remains a neglected focus for theory and practice in shaping cities. Given women’s continuing economic and social marginalization and the prevalence of violence against women, how can this be the case? Despite several decades of feminist scholarship, dominant perspectives within the “the right to the city” literature pay little attention to how “rights” are gendered. In contrast, feminist and queer scholarship concerned with everyday life …
Intersections of (infra)structural violence and cultural inclusion: The geopolitics of minority cemeteries and crematoria provision
Building on embodied and de‐colonial approaches to geopolitics, this paper examines the relationship between forms of governance in municipal cemetery and crematorium provision and the needs of established minorities, arguing that inadequate infrastructure and services can constitute harm. Crucially, it is contended that forms of governance impact not only on the living, but also on perceptions of the wellbeing of the dead. Grounded in a study of…
Race, Gender, and Positionality in Urban Planning Research
Reflexivity within planning research has emerged as central to a series of epistemological and methodological debates. There has been less discussion, however, about how research positionalities might intersect with assumptions regarding gendered and raced identities. Writing from within the field of urban planning I consider how a pervasive inattentiveness to the racial and gendered dynamics of the wider field obscures the articulation of the co…
Diverse teams researching diversity: Negotiating identity, place and embodiment in qualitative research
Fieldwork encounters are not only contingent to biographical subjectivities, but are mediated by a confluence of identity, place and embodiment. This paper offers reflexive accounts of researchers with various socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, who collaborated as a team to examine the varied funerary experiences and needs of established minorities and recent migrants in England and Wales. Focusing on the researchers' varied personal ex…
Whose diversity? Race, space and the European city
European cities have increasingly highlighted diversity as a marker of their progressive status. A growing field of research argues that “super-diverse” neighborhoods exemplify a normalization of ethnic and racial difference as a positive facet of everyday life. However, contemporary manifestations of urban diversity cannot be disentangled easily from the European colonial legacy that underlies a series of racial and spatial imaginaries. I argue …
Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power
This paper takes the development of the British town planning movement as its starting point to explore a series of challenges for the discipline’s historiography. The emergence of the professional field involved the circulation of ideas beyond the metropolitan core to colonial territories with spatial interventions that were deemed both physically and morally beneficial. The paper explores the role played by the discipline in developing spatiali…
Exploring the intersections between local knowledge and environmental regulation: A study of shale gas extraction in Texas and Lancashire
Contemporary shale gas extraction, also known as ‘fracking’, has become one of the most contentious environmental issues facing Europe and North America. Academic and policy debates have hitherto focused principally on questions related to scientific disputes, risk perception, potential health impacts, and the wider economic and geo-political dimensions to energy security. This paper draws on extensive qualitative research in Texas and Lancashire…
Death in the Peripheries: Planning for Minority Ethnic Groups beyond “the City”
“Deathscapes” constitute a growing field of research, yet the topic remains widely neglected within urban planning. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of existing provision for death, remembrance, and the disposal of body remains for ethnic minority groups living in four British towns: Huddersfield, Newport, Northampton, and Swindon. The paper argues that the failure of contemporary planning policy and practice to address the intersections be…
Is the ‘New Deal for Communities’ a New Deal for Equality? Getting Women on Board in Neighbourhood Governance
Across the EU, neighbourhoods have been the focus for achieving social cohesion and reducing social exclusion. Neighbourhood renewal and community involvement were central themes in the UK Labour government’s urban policy. This article focuses on the challenge of community engagement given the heterogeneity of individuals and neighbourhoods. It uses the case study of a New Deal for Communities (NDC) partnership to explore the experiences of diffe…
Building caring communities: A special issue in honor of Janet L. Smith
Regarding Statues: Whiteness, Space, and the Postcolonial European Imagination
In recent years, there have been renewed calls to remove colonial statues in many European cities. The increased politicization of colonial heritage has become a matter of concern to urban planning as heritage disputes have erupted over the presence of specific statues and other monuments. In this paper, I argue that the retention of colonial statues is a racially charged political act that reinforces the white domination of space. I draw on crit…
Cemeteries and crematoria, forgotten public space in multicultural Europe. An agenda for inclusion and citizenship
In western Europe, municipal or otherwise state‐commissioned cemeteries and crematoria are public spaces and services, open to all. Cemeteries and crematoria grounds are neglected in geographical, planning and policy debates about the character, design, management, use and accessibility of public spaces, and likewise debates about the social inclusion of migrants and minorities. This may reflect a tendency to situate cemeteries socially and geogr…
Fracking and epistemic injustice: A feminist critique of knowledge formation
The expansion of fracking, an intensive form of hydrocarbon extraction, has been met with increasing public hostility, spanning a diverse range of interests and political allegiances. However, to date, few authors have engaged with the role of gender and women activists. In this paper, I consider how gender and gendered ideas have been used as a resource to underpin fracking protests in the USA and UK. I find that a problematic gendered binary ha…
City centre masterplanning and cultural spaces: A case study of Sheffield
Informalizing Participation: Insights from Chicago and Johannesburg
This paper argues that formal participation in planning remains simplistic and enhances community conflict. The increasing diversity of the public makes traditional forms of representation increasingly problematic. There is a need to situate formal participation within increasingly informal forms of participation between state and citizens. Qualitative research in Chicago and Johannesburg illustrates the difficulties caused by formal participatio…
Is the ‘New Deal for Communities’ a New Deal for Equality? Getting Women on Board in Neighbourhood Governance
Across the EU, neighbourhoods have been the focus for achieving social cohesion and reducing social exclusion. Neighbourhood renewal and community involvement were central themes in the UK Labour government’s urban policy. This article focuses on the challenge of community engagement given the heterogeneity of individuals and neighbourhoods. It uses the case study of a New Deal for Communities (NDC) partnership to explore the experiences of diffe…
Exploring the intersections between local knowledge and environmental regulation: A study of shale gas extraction in Texas and Lancashire
Contemporary shale gas extraction, also known as ‘fracking’, has become one of the most contentious environmental issues facing Europe and North America. Academic and policy debates have hitherto focused principally on questions related to scientific disputes, risk perception, potential health impacts, and the wider economic and geo-political dimensions to energy security. This paper draws on extensive qualitative research in Texas and Lancashire…
Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life
Gender remains a neglected focus for theory and practice in shaping cities. Given women’s continuing economic and social marginalization and the prevalence of violence against women, how can this be the case? Despite several decades of feminist scholarship, dominant perspectives within the “the right to the city” literature pay little attention to how “rights” are gendered. In contrast, feminist and queer scholarship concerned with everyday life …
Race, ethnicity and the city
We write this editorial as the founding editors of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City. The launch of the journal takes place in the midst of a global pandemic and ongoing widespread protes
Rules, Norms and Practices – A Comparative Study Exploring Disposal Practices and Facilities in Northern Europe
We identify and analyse practices and management regimes around burial and handling of ashes across eight case study towns within six Northern European countries. We analyse management of cemeteries and crematoria gardens, majority practices and provision for minority communities, including various burial types, cremated remains, the re-use of graves, and costs for interments. Comparative data is drawn from analysis of national and local regulati…
Fracking and epistemic injustice: A feminist critique of knowledge formation
The expansion of fracking, an intensive form of hydrocarbon extraction, has been met with increasing public hostility, spanning a diverse range of interests and political allegiances. However, to date, few authors have engaged with the role of gender and women activists. In this paper, I consider how gender and gendered ideas have been used as a resource to underpin fracking protests in the USA and UK. I find that a problematic gendered binary ha…
Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power
This paper takes the development of the British town planning movement as its starting point to explore a series of challenges for the discipline’s historiography. The emergence of the professional field involved the circulation of ideas beyond the metropolitan core to colonial territories with spatial interventions that were deemed both physically and morally beneficial. The paper explores the role played by the discipline in developing spatiali…
Death in the Peripheries: Planning for Minority Ethnic Groups beyond “the City”
“Deathscapes” constitute a growing field of research, yet the topic remains widely neglected within urban planning. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of existing provision for death, remembrance, and the disposal of body remains for ethnic minority groups living in four British towns: Huddersfield, Newport, Northampton, and Swindon. The paper argues that the failure of contemporary planning policy and practice to address the intersections be…
Intersections of (infra)structural violence and cultural inclusion: The geopolitics of minority cemeteries and crematoria provision
Building on embodied and de‐colonial approaches to geopolitics, this paper examines the relationship between forms of governance in municipal cemetery and crematorium provision and the needs of established minorities, arguing that inadequate infrastructure and services can constitute harm. Crucially, it is contended that forms of governance impact not only on the living, but also on perceptions of the wellbeing of the dead. Grounded in a study of…
Europe and the people without planning: Reconsidering British interventions in colonial Hong Kong
The commissioning of a plan by Patrick Abercrombie for British Hong Kong in 1947 is the entry point to explore claims of ‘benevolent colonialism’. Through an engagement with British colonial attitudes towards the majority Chinese population, we can critically re-evaluate claims that British planning brought a more enlightened form of urbanism. Instead, we find colonial inaction and a marked difference in housing and development standards based la…
An invitation to discourse on race, ethnicity and the city
Whose diversity? Race, space and the European city
European cities have increasingly highlighted diversity as a marker of their progressive status. A growing field of research argues that “super-diverse” neighborhoods exemplify a normalization of ethnic and racial difference as a positive facet of everyday life. However, contemporary manifestations of urban diversity cannot be disentangled easily from the European colonial legacy that underlies a series of racial and spatial imaginaries. I argue …
Race, Gender, and Positionality in Urban Planning Research
Reflexivity within planning research has emerged as central to a series of epistemological and methodological debates. There has been less discussion, however, about how research positionalities might intersect with assumptions regarding gendered and raced identities. Writing from within the field of urban planning I consider how a pervasive inattentiveness to the racial and gendered dynamics of the wider field obscures the articulation of the co…
Hindu Mobilities and Cremation: Minority, Migrant and Gendered Dialogues and Dialectics in English and Welsh Towns
In Chap. 1 Avril Maddrell, Brenda Mathijssen, Yasminah Beebeejaun, Katie McClymont and Danny McNally untangle the embodied, gendered, racialised and institutionalized cremation practices of Hindu communities in three case study towns: Northampton and Swindon in England and Newport in Wales. They argue that attending to questions of (in)adequate funerary infrastructure and norms – including prompt cremation; accommodating ritual requirements for w…
Cemeteries and crematoria, forgotten public space in multicultural Europe. An agenda for inclusion and citizenship
In western Europe, municipal or otherwise state‐commissioned cemeteries and crematoria are public spaces and services, open to all. Cemeteries and crematoria grounds are neglected in geographical, planning and policy debates about the character, design, management, use and accessibility of public spaces, and likewise debates about the social inclusion of migrants and minorities. This may reflect a tendency to situate cemeteries socially and geogr…
Diverse teams researching diversity: Negotiating identity, place and embodiment in qualitative research
Fieldwork encounters are not only contingent to biographical subjectivities, but are mediated by a confluence of identity, place and embodiment. This paper offers reflexive accounts of researchers with various socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, who collaborated as a team to examine the varied funerary experiences and needs of established minorities and recent migrants in England and Wales. Focusing on the researchers' varied personal ex…
Temporalities of cemeteries: The tensions and flows of perpetuity and change in ‘slow’ places
Cemeteries in the UK and Ireland are typically viewed as a final ‘place of rest’ for the deceased where their remains will not be disturbed. This sense is at least in some part created by the norm of in-perpetuity grave rights in these countries. Yet while ‘in-perpetuity’ suggests fixity, it is defined and managed in varying ways in different settings, including an ultimate fixed term for some graves and cemeteries. Over decades, in-perpetuity ce…
Regarding Statues: Whiteness, Space, and the Postcolonial European Imagination
In recent years, there have been renewed calls to remove colonial statues in many European cities. The increased politicization of colonial heritage has become a matter of concern to urban planning as heritage disputes have erupted over the presence of specific statues and other monuments. In this paper, I argue that the retention of colonial statues is a racially charged political act that reinforces the white domination of space. I draw on crit…
Building caring communities: A special issue in honor of Janet L. Smith
Diasporic Spaces of Conviviality and Domesticity: On the Political Significance of Kitchens in Post-War Britain
My intervention starts at the site of the kitchen, a space that remains often understood as a private site of gendered domestic labour. In this article, I examine how the British modernized post-war kitchen became valorized as a sphere of women’s labour. The ‘ideal kitchen’ reinscribed raced and gendered ideas about the family. For incoming Black and South Asian families, the inferiority of sub-standard housing, facilitated by the de facto colour…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Ethnic group (6 works) · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health (6 works) · Social science (6 works)