Yaffa Truelove

  • Associate Professor
  • GEOGRAPHY

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 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
  • Spring 2018  IAFS 4500  The Post Cold War World: Global Political Ecology 
  • Fall 2017  IAFS 4500  The Post Cold War World: Global Political Ecology  

Selected Publications

Truelove, Y. (Forthcoming). Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water politics in Delhi. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.

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

Truelove, Y. (2019). Rethinking Water Insecurity, Inequality and Infrastructure through an Embodied Urban Political Ecology” Wiley Interdisciplinary Review on Water, 6 (3). 

Lawhon, M. and Truelove, Y. (2019). Disambiguating the southern urban critique: Propositions, pathways, and possibilities for a more global urban studies. Urban Studies. DOI 10.1177/0042098019829412.

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

McFarlane, C., Silver, J., and Truelove, Y. (2017) Cities within cities: Intra-Urban Comparison of Infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town. Urban Geography, 38(9), 1393-1417.

Truelove, Y. (2016) Incongruent Waterworlds: Situating the everyday practices and power of waterin Delhi. South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 14.

Truelove, Y. (2011) (Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework. Geoforum, 42(2): 143-152.

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

Silvey, R., Olson, B., and Truelove, Y. (2006) “Migration and (im)mobility” in Handbook of Political Geography, Robinson, J.D., Low, M. and Cox, K (eds.). Sage: London.