Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography and inaugural Director of the Institute of Inequality and Democracy at UCLA's Luskin Schol of Public Affairs. She holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her research and scholarship focuses on poverty and inequality in four domains: how the urban poor in cities from Kolkata to Chicago face and fight eviction, foreclosure, and displacement; how global financialization, working in varied realms from microfinance to real-estate speculation, creates new markets in debt and risk; how the efforts to manage and govern the problem of poverty reveal the contradictions and limits of liberal democracy; how new programs of welfare and human development are being demanded and made in the global South. She is the author of several books including Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010), which received the Paul Davidoff book award for social justice scholarship. Her most recent book is Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World (UC Press, 2016). During the last year, her public scholarship has challenged white supremacy and white power.
