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Ananya RoyAssistant Professor, City and Regional Planning |
Roy chairs the undergraduate Urban Studies major in that department. She is also the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for International and Area Studies, acting also as Faculty Director of Berkeley Programs for Study Abroad. Her 2003 book, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, was listed as one of the top twelve books of 2003 by The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and Humanities. Roy teaches such courses as "Urbanization in Developing Countries," "The City" and "Development Theories and Practices." Students praise for Roy is high indeed: "I have never taken part in a more thought-provoking, stimulating, and challenging seminar, nor had the privilege of doing so with a more well-informed, dynamic, knowledgeable, articulate, and inspiring figure."
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I am privileged to teach in what I believe is one of the world’s greatest public universities. We have a public mandate for inclusive education and a long history of transformative education. I feel this, in palpable fashion, when I read and grade the student research papers for my large undergraduate classes. A student writes that a great change is in the making, because here at UC Berkeley, in a class such as this, students not only study economic globalization, but also that he, son of a sweatshop worker, the first in his family to get a college education, is present. Another student writes that a change is in the making when she, the daughter of opportunity, graduates from Berkeley with the ability to dismantle the gated bastions of wealth and power within which she was raised. This is the privilege, and responsibility, of teaching at Berkeley.
Two principles are central to my teaching. First, I seek to globalize the curriculum of urban studies and planning, educating students about the great cities that lie outside the domain of their EuroAmerican experiences, challenging them to rethink the certainties of “home” in light of the lessons from “elsewhere.” Second, I seek to link knowledge to action. Our graduate city planning students train to be professionals but they aim to be much more than technocrats: I teach them the value of critique and doubt. Similarly, with my undergraduates who are eager to change the world but often eschew status quo institutions, I challenge them to craft spaces of negotiability within powerful institutions.
I am a teacher, and I am therefore also a mentor and advisor. I take pride in my graduate students who develop their own identities as teachers; in my undergraduates who find their way to prestigious jobs and graduate programs. But I also believe that teaching requires something more than individual mentorship; it requires institution-building. To this end, I have worked with colleagues in DCRP to establish an undergraduate major in Urban Studies, a program that I now chair. As Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the Division of International and Area Studies, I now oversee various teaching programs. There are days spent in programmatic review, committee meetings, fund-raising, meetings, proposal-writing, resource allocation, more meetings.
But when I am in my classroom it all makes sense. For how can I challenge my students to open up new terrains of action in powerful institutions if I cannot insist on a more equitable and accessible academy? How can I challenge my students to craft new paradigms of knowledge if I cannot imagine ways to implement and institutionalize new epistemologies, new scholarship, and new traditions of excellence? We have to earn the privilege to teach and I am paying my dues.
Acceptance speech from 2006 Teaching Awards Ceremony