New Publication: Intimate Infrastructures. The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, India

We just received confirmation that our co-authored article for Geoforum "Intimate Infrastructures: The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, India" has been accepted for publication. This article has been in the pipeline for some time since the completion of our British Academy funded 'Disconnected Infrastructures and Violence Against Women' project in Kerala. It has been written jointly with Dr Nabeela Ahmed from University of Sheffield who worked as post-doctoral Research Associate on this project.And abstract of the article below. Full article has been uploaded in UCL repository for free online access.Intimate Infrastructures: The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, Indiaby Ayona Datta and Nabeela AhmedUrban infrastructures can enable and embody multiple forms of violence against women - from the spectacular and immediate, to the slow, everyday and intimate. Disconnections and absences of infrastructure - from water and sanitation, to public transport and toilets -  fracture peripheries and low-income neighbourhoods from resources, rights and mobility within the city, and in everyday life, enacting some of the largest tolls on women. This 'infrastructural violence' (Rodgers & O'Neill, 2012) is experienced in intimate ways by women in low-income neighbourhoods. While they lack access to adequate resources in urban settlements they simultaneously face all forms of physical violence during access to and use of water, toilets, public transport, energy use and walkways. Drawing from empirical fieldwork in the city of Thiruvanathapuram, Kerala, in southern India, we adopt an expanded notion of infrastructure that is mutually constitututive of gender-based relations of power and violence from the home to the city. Developing the rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence, we argue first, that lack of access to infrastructure is a form of intimate violence and second,  that this violence is experienced and constituted through multiple scales, forms, sites and temporalities of infrastructural absence. In doing so, we further contribute to the extension of  debate in feminist critical geography to critique binary constructions of gender based violence - collapsing  hierarchies of intimate and structural violence through the violence of infrastructure.