Yaffa Truelove
Assistant Professor of Geography • Urban and Feminist Political Ecology of Water • India • Southern Urbanism • Urban Infrastructure • Water Governance • Nature-Society Relations • Faculty of International Affairs • PhD University of Cambridge, 2015
Human Geography • Environment-Society

Research Interests

At the nexus of urban geography and human-environment relations, my research primarily examines the connections between urban waterscapes and socio-political processes in cities of the global South. In particular, I examine water and its infrastructures as a lens for analyzing social and material relations in cities as well as differing regimes and institutions of everyday urban governance. My prior research has predominately focused on Indian cities, contributing to theorizations of urban and feminist political ecologies, Southern and comparative urbanism, and “actually existing” modalities of urban water governance in postcolonial cities.  Recent work also includes a collaborative intra-urban comparison of precarious infrastructures in the cities of Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town as well as a project examining infrastructural violence and the everyday politics of water disruption in India’s capital city, Delhi. 

Recent Courses Taught

  • Fall 2021  GEOG 1972 Environment-Society Geography
  • Fall 2020  GEOG 3622 / IAFS 3670 Cities of the Global South
  • Fall 2020  IAFS 4500  The Post Cold War World: Global Political Ecology
  • Fall 2019  GEOG 3622 / IAFS 3670 Cities of the Global South
  • Fall 2019  IAFS 4500  The Post Cold War World: Global Political Ecology
  • Spring 2019  GEOG 3422 Political Ecology
  • Spring 2019  GEOG 3622 / IAFS 3670 Cities of the Global South
  • Fall 2018  IAFS 4500  The Post Cold War World: Global Political Ecology 

Selected Publications

2022   Truelove, Y. and Ruszczyk, H. Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender, intimate infrastructures, and slow infrastructural violence. Political Geography. Doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102492.

2021   Truelove, Y. In-between People and Infrastructure: Constructions of Gender, Water and Liminal Space in Delhi’s Unauthorized Colonies, Environment and Planning D.

2021   Truelove, Y. and Cornea, N. Rethinking Urban Environmental and Infrastructural Governance in the Everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(2): 231-246 doi.org/10.1177/ 2399654420972117                       

2021   Truelove, Y. “Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(2): 282-299. 

2020   Truelove, Y. and O’Reilly, K. “Making India’s Cleanest City: Sanitation, Intersectionality, and Infrastructural Violence,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620941521.

2020   Lawhon, M. and Truelove, Y. “Disambiguating the Southern Urban Critique: Propositions, Pathways, and Possibilities for a more Global Urban Studies,” Urban Studies 57(1): 3-20.

2019   Truelove, Y. “Gray zones: The Everyday Practices and Governance of Water Beyond the Network,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(6): 1758-1774.

2019   Truelove, Y. Rethinking Water Insecurity, Inequality and Infrastructure through an Embodied Urban Political Ecology” WIREs Water, 6(3), 1-7. 

2018   Truelove, Y. Negotiating States of Water: Producing Illegibility, Bureaucratic Arbitrariness, and Distributive Injustices in Delhi. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 36(5): 949-967

2017   McFarlane, C., Silver, J., and Truelove, Y. Cities within Cities: Intra-Urban Comparison of Infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town. Urban Geography38(9), 1393-1417.

2016   Truelove, Y. Incongruent Waterworlds: Situating the Everyday Practices and Power of Water in Delhi. South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 14, 1-25.

2011   Truelove, Y. (Re-)Conceptualizing Water Inequality in Delhi, India through a Feminist Political Ecology Framework. Geoforum, 42(2): 143-152.

BOOKS

2020   Lawhon, M. with contributions from Lené Le Roux, Anesu Makina and Yaffa Truelove. Making Urban Theory: Learning and Unlearning through Southern Cities.  Routledge: Milton Park. 

BOOK CHAPTERS

2021   Truelove, Y. “Beyond-the-Network Urbanism: Everyday Infrastructures in States of Mutation.” In McFarlane, C. & Lancione, M. (Eds.). Thinking Global Urbanism: Essays on the City and its Futur

2021   Truelove, Y. “Dr. K: The Middle-Class Social Worker.” In Bombay Brokers, (Ed.) Lisa Bjorkman. Duke University Press: Durham.  

2020   Lawhon, M. and Truelove, Y. “Disambiguating the southern urban critique.” In Making Urban Theory: Learning and Unlearning through Southern Cities, Lawhon, M. with contributions from Lené Le Roux, Anesu Makina and Yaffa Truelove.  Routledge: Milton Park, pp. 25-35.

2020   Lawhon, M. and Truelove, Y. “Pathways forward: Urban Studies after the southern urban critique.” InMaking Urban Theory: Learning and Unlearning through Southern Cities, Lawhon, M. with contributions from Lené Le Roux, Anesu Makina and Yaffa Truelove.  Routledge: Milton Park, pp.71-75.

2011   Truelove, Y. and Mawdsley, E. Discourses of citizenship and criminality in clean, green Delhi. In A Companion to the Anthropology of India. (Ed.) Clark-Deces, Isabelle. Wiley-Blackwell: Malden.

Updated Nov 12, 2021