Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2015 to 2026, she served as founding director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and held the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy.
A scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development, Ananya’s research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession. Her work encompasses urban transformations and world city-making, urban informality and state power, global circuits of financialization, poverty management as a project of postcolonial and liberal rule, histories and practices of housing justice, and most recently the problem and promise of sanctuary. In comradeship with unhoused communities, her current research is concerned with racial banishment and counter-geographies of refusal and rebellion in Los Angeles.
Read Ananya’s 2026 essay in Jewish Currents on Fugitive Sanctuaries.
Watch for the book, We Live in Public, co-edited with housing justice comrades.
Journey with the online exhibition, Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake.
Read reflections on a decade of running the Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
“While encampment evictions have been underway for a while, what is distinctive about the present conjuncture is that the criminalization of homelessness is yoked to the ruse of housing. We argue that such offers transform unhoused persons into state subjects governed by the homeless services bureaucracy, its chronopolitics of waiting and its spatial logics of enforced separation.”
“Displaceability by Design: The Spatial Governance of Mass Homelessness”
“In this tribute to Mike Davis, I engage with his concept of the “slum” to analyze the present conjuncture of the First World slum, notably mass homelessness in Los Angeles. While Davis honed his attention on global neoliberalism, I draw upon his incisive LA essays to uncover the violence of liberal governance, specifically what he calls “community capitalism.””
Through close attention to tenant struggles, and the community histories thereof, we demonstrate the hard-won, but fragile, victories achieved by tenants in the face of redevelopment.
“Policing tenancy: the struggle for housing and land in Los Angeles”
