The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a digital workshop on:
Testing the Waters: Young Women’s Work and Mobile Aspirations in India’s Small Cities
Speaker:
Mukta Naik, Fellow, CPR
About the Talk
While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this talk investigates young women’s work, education, aspirations and mobilities in smaller cities which have relatively weak scalar positions in terms of global economic, political and social power. The research indicates that small cities act as regional action spaces for women from villages and small towns to capitalise on fleeting opportunities and push against patriarchal boundaries through mobilities. It shows how women use a range of strategies from individual power tactics within households to leveraging institutional support systems to do so. The findings suggest that situating migrant-friendly policy initiatives in small cities could potentially improve employment and mobility outcomes for young women.
About the Speaker
Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, is an architect and urban planner. Her research interests include housing and urban poverty, urban informality, and internal migration, as well as urban transformations in small cities. Naik is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture and has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from Texas A&M University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Urban Development and Governance from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here
