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ESRC Project Lead & Network Coordinator

Dr Sally Cawood is a Lecturer in Economic Geography at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. Over the past 10 years, Sally has worked on interdisciplinary research projects on water and sanitation, urban precarity and hazardous labour practices, including manual scavenging, in Bangladesh and India. Sally is a member of the Political Ecologies research cluster at Lancaster, and sits on the advisory board of the Initiative for Sanitation Workers. Sally is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project (2022-2025) on Hazardous Sanitation Labour, and British Council-funded project (2023-2024) on occupational and educational mobility among Dalit minority women and girls in Pakistan, alongside the Centre for Law and Justice.

Former ESRC Project PDRA & Network Coordinator

Dr Pratik Mishra is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He was previously involved in the ESRC project at Lancaster University. His research seeks to draw connections between the fields of labour studies, urban studies, and political ecology. Pratik completed his PhD in Human Geography from King’s College London. His PhD research looked at the everyday politics of labour within a brick kiln cluster on the outskirts of Delhi. His research articles have been published in several journals including Focaal, Urbanisation, SAMAJ and EPW. He is presently also involved in a film-making project on brick kiln workers’ life-worlds.

Network Coordinator

I am an urban and labour geographer broadly interested in migrant mobilities, essential work, social reproduction, unpaid labour, and the future of informal(ised) work in cities of the global south. In 2023, I defended my doctoral thesis in Geography at the University of Cambridge. Using a multi-sited, mixed methods approach combining oral history interviews, archival research, and key informant interviews with housing and labour organizers, my doctoral research explores the everyday lives, politics, and place-making survival strategies of informal infrastructural workers in the city from the long twentieth-century to the present day. With the aid of a redeveloped concept of working-class geography, my thesis proposes a redefinition of labor informalization as the historical and current-day deregulation of social reproduction and argues this deregulation has been a driving force behind the production of the contemporary urban landscape and the privatization of everyday life in globalizing Delhi, resulting in migrant hypermobility, the continued dispossession of the labour of urban endurance, and an uneven working-class politics of anti-depletion.