Space, Segregation and Discrimination (Paperback - 2021)

About the Book

To read a campus through its built form and infrastructure is to unravel the complex relationship between disciplinary pedagogic intention and the material form it takes. This volume has emerged from a study on the politics of space within institutes of higher education, with a focus on five residential campuses in India.

Each campus is viewed through a lens that interrogates the ways in which spatial decisions reflect an understanding of gender-sexuality-caste-class dimensions and hierarchies implicit in the discipline. The book argues that architectural and infrastructural gestures create a sense of belonging—or not—to the life of the university. Non-teaching staff housing, isolated from the rest, as if turned away from the life of the intellect, marks caste and class on the body of the campus, just as much as inward-looking womEn’s hostels reflect protectionist attitudes, and absence or presence of community spaces indicate openness to inclusive democratic education.

Compelling the reader to acknowledge the normativity of exclusion, Space, Segregation, Discrimination identifies instances of negotiation, struggle and subversion where the infrastructure changed formally or informally in response to students or staff claiming spaces from an ideological standpoint not originally anticipated, while also indicating where the infrastructure could change more to become more inclusive.

About the Author

Chayanika Shah is a feminist and queer rights activist, who has been involved with the women’s movements in India for many years. She is an optimist activist at heart, a physicist by training and a teacher by choice.