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Topic

Mapping Placemaking Practices of Five Young Women at the Intersection of Multiple Marginalizations from Homegrown Neighbourhoods of Urban India

Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Date & location

• Friday, November 17, 2025

• 11:00 A.M.

• Clearihue Building, Room B007

• And Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Kathy Sanford, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, ӣ��Ӱ�� (Supervisor)

• Dr. Tanya Manning-Lewis, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UVic (Member)

• Dr. Darlene Clover, Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies, UVic (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Cindy Hanson, Department of Education, University of Regina 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Gary MacGillivray, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UVic

   

Abstract

Urban cities in India exclude young women from public life through fear of violence, familial control and patriarchal expectations. Their existence in public spaces is generally looked at through a lens of suspicion and excessive control – emotional and embodied. This research studies the spatial lived experiences of five young women from homegrown neighbourhoods that are defined as lower income, lacking in infrastructure and mutually dependent close-knit communities. The purpose of this research is to offer a platform for the young women to share their spatial lived experiences and challenge a homogenous and normative understanding of their stories. Using a post-qualitative research inquiry, this research studies the ways young women live within their communities and the placemaking practices that they resort to in order to create safe, communal spaces for themselves. The research is interdisciplinary as it is placed within adult education, feminist geography, urban planning, and community-engaged research and contributes to each of these scholarships by offering a nuanced and complex understanding of the stories of young women from urban India. In this research, I argue that even within the bounds of limitation that young women face, they are able to find a sense of belonging and agency within their neighbourhood. These ways include acts of everyday resistances, forming support systems of friends and consistently negotiating their place within their neighbourhoods, home, and schools. The research study (re)stories the lives of the five young women and the places that they occupy through narrative mapping tool called StoryMaps that positions young women’s stories and the places that they occupy as central to the research. Through (re)storying, the research highlights the following: (1) spatial lived experiences of young women are determined by their intersectional identities and are constantly evolving; (2) placemaking scholarship should include informal acts of placemaking in order to be inclusive of the lives of marginalized people within their communities; (3) lived spatiality is a constant negotiation that young women engage in through acts of everyday resistance; and (4) lived spatiality and placemaking are paradoxical and embodied and should be examined as such.