Pallavi Gupta, third year graduate student in the Department of Geography was selected as a 2019 Humanities Professional Pathway Fellow. The goal of this fellowship was to support her development as a community-engaged scholar. She worked in collaboration with two labor unions in India this summer to understand the experiences of cleaning staff in railway stations. She will integrate learnings from the field, through presentations and discussion with students in UNC on the intersection of waste, space, gender and labour relations in India. Her story is featured in UNC Global news.
Photograph 1: One male and one female cleaning staff in blue uniforms with yellow helmets, using a jet machine for cleaning the platform and tracks in a railway station.
Photograph 2: single disk cleaning machine
Photograph 3: the journey of waste disposal in a railway station