A professor from the University of California, Los Angeles is holding a talk regarding the processes of racial banishment Tuesday in the Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St. in Urbana.

Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy and professor in urban planning and social welfare, researches new systems of international development. She has written about numerous urban areas, such as the global south in “City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty.” The talk she will be giving at the University will be about contemporary America.

Roy views racial banishment as violence acted by the state against racialized peoples and communities. She will also be discussing how deprivation and disposability are being rebuilt major cities in America.

The event, called “Racial Banishment: A Postcolonial Critique of the Urban Condition in America,” will begin at 6 p.m.

Susan Koshy, director for the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and associate professor in LAS, will do an introduction of the event. Koshy’s role as the director is to organize conferences and bring in scholars.

Roy is coming to the University as a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

“We are bringing her here because she is a prominent scholar and she’ll be here for two days as part of the Nicholson visit,” Koshy said. “That’s the very special honor that we reserve for scholars who have completely transformed their field or moved their field in a new direction.”

Koshy said she works in urban planning and social welfare and has published extensively on urban transformations in the global south that is on the developing road.

“The topic of her lecture is racial banishment and what she’s looking at in this particular lecture is going to be the housing crisis in major cities across the U.S. and how that has disproportionately influenced communities of color,” Koshy said.

Communities of color are being pushed out to the peripheries of urban areas. Their existence is very precarious in this new environment when they are moved out, Koshy said. Roy is trying to study this pattern and she describes this process as racial banishment.

“This is something that is a pattern in U.S. cities in particular and her case studies are in California; she is looking at Oakland and the Bay Area and she is also looking at Los Angeles, which is where she is currently. I think what she has to say would really resonate with people here because of what is going on in Chicago and the changes that are taking place,” Koshy said.

In addition to an introduction given by Koshy, the talk will include a panel of respondents: Faye Harrison, professor in LAS, Ken Salo, lecturer in FAA and David Wilson, professor in LAS.

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