Chennai Floods: a decade’s hindsight w/ Priti Narayan

In this episode, we speak with Priti Narayan about the devastating floods that hit Chennai, India—a city grappling with the compounding effects of climate change and urban inequality. Reflecting on the floods a decade later, Priti unpacks how such dramatic events both reveal and deepen the everyday structural violence embedded in urban life.We explore how climate disasters are experienced unevenly, shaped by social, economic, and spatial injustices, and how responses to these events often reproduce the same inequalities they expose.Priti also shares powerful reflections on the role of public scholarship and activism—especially in moments when violence is not always visible, but deeply felt by marginalized communities.Priti is an Assistant Professor at UBC Geography. Her research and teaching interests center around urban processes and politics, particularly in India. In her primary research project, she examines how contemporary urban development interacts with state-society relations in Chennai, India. She uses ethnographic and archival methods to investigate how residents negotiate with local politicians, bureaucrats, and activists to preserve citizenship in urban landscapes marked by violent, large-scale slum evictions. She has been learning from collective struggles for tenure security for the urban poor in Chennai for over 13 years now. Priti is passionate about collaborative activist scholarship which highlights lived experiences — drawing on the politics of expertise and knowledge production, feminist methodologies, and public scholarship. She frequently collaborates to write about economic and social protections for unorganized workers and urban development in Tamil Nadu. Her writing has appeared in news and media outlets such as The Times of India, The Hindu, OpenDemocracy, and Kafila, among others.We encourage you to read Priti’s public articles, such as these:Slow violence and the Spectacle – Dispossession, segregation, and the Chennai Floods: Priti NarayanRosenman, E. and P. Narayan. 2023. Economic geography for and by whom? Rethinking expertise and accountability.Chapters:(00:00) Introduction & Experience(08:25) 2015 Chennai floods(15:35) How come is preparedness for disaster weak? (19:00) Is it "corruption"?(23:30) Actors of unevenness (41:00) On slow violence(46:43) Public scholarship(56:24) Suppression of dissent(1:11:00) Critical hope