Teaching &
Mentorship
Teaching and mentorship are central to Ananya’s academic life. Refusing the division between research and teaching, she insists that scholarship emerges from the vitality of the classroom, especially that of the public university, and is actively shaped by the curiosity and creativity of my students.
Ananya has been privileged to receive recognition for this work, notably in the form of the highest teaching and mentorship honors the University of California, Berkeley (where she was on the faculty from 1999 until 2015) and its students can bestow on its faculty.
For Ananya, the work of teaching and mentorship has always entailed building – with students and faculty – new curricula and programs. These include the Urban Studies major, the Global Poverty and Practice Minor, the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley and the Social and Economic Justice Area of Concentration in the MSW program at UCLA. For many of these programs, she has conceptualized and taught anchor courses such as The City and Global Poverty and Practice and continues to teach core courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UCLA including Histories and Theories of Planning and The Urban Revolution.
In 2023, she taught (with Carla Orendorff and Rasheed Shabazz) the Community Collaborative course, Spatial Justice in the Age of Mass Homelessness: A Lab for Liberatory Projects, a UCLA Urban Planning graduate capstone course. Bringing together MURP students with encampment and movement scholars, the course focused on the Aetna Street community in Van Nuys and included a community plan and design for encampments rooted in traditions and histories of self-determination; a research-based strategy towards the abolition of municipal ordinances that criminalize homelessness; a people’s land-use plan that maps and reimagines the control and use of vacant public land, including land controlled by public agencies such as LA Metro; and a street newspaper for poor people’s histories in Los Angeles.
Over the years, Ananya has had the great privilege of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students and serving on dissertation committees. Many of these students are now themselves faculty at universities in the US and beyond. While she can take no credit for their transformative scholarship, she is proud to share here a glimpse of the many extraordinary books these scholars have penned. Ananya views these books, and other work by her students, as her guides, drawing on them to think, teach, and mentor.
