Professor Pushpa Arabindoo
Lecturer in Geography and Urban Design at UCL Department of Geography and Co-director of the inter-disciplinary UCL Urban Laboratory
In this talk I would like to emphasise the need for fostering a new learning culture, one that reworks the relationship between academic research, activism and professional practice. This requires a revamping of
our orthodox pedagogy, from mundane tasks such as conformist reading lists to more radical gestures such as exploring and inhabiting the hyphen between academia and practice.
To illustrate this, I draw on my own positionality as an academic-practitioner and the challenges of wearing two hats at the same time. In doing so, I offer two provocations: what is the agency of praxis, one that is more than applied theory, and secondly, as someone working on urban planning issues in the global South from the institutional metrocentricity of the global North, I ask how well do arguments travel, and what it means to sometimes work by proxy.