We welcome Dr. Gaurav Mittal as a UTM Mobility Network Postdoctoral Fellow supervised by Professor Shauna Brail.
Gaurav comes from an interdisciplinary background. He completed his PhD in human geography at the National University of Singapore in 2021 with a prestigious President’s Graduate Fellowship. He also holds a master’s degree in urban policy and a bachelor’s degree in architecture.
He received the Prestige Prize for his PhD research from the World Conference on Transport Research Society in 2019.
Gaurav’s academic interests lie at the intersections of urban transport, policy mobilities, and governance. He brings these categories together to critically examine the role of the state in ordering urban societies.
He has more than six years of full-time research and professional experience and seven years of part-time teaching experience in India and Singapore.
Gaurav says that after working in the Global South context for quite some time, he is looking forward to working with University of Toronto researchers and “the opportunity to widen my horizons and learn more about how platform mobilities are functioning in the Global North context.”
My work engages with the study of biopolitics by explicitly investigating the governmentalities that shape material urban mobilities. It gets to the heart of ongoing urban planning and governance discussions and debates over social inequality and sustainable urban futures.
In some sense, we kind of think that the mobilities in North are different than South, but I think that there are many common things which can be explored between these “imaginary” boundaries – boundaries which have been created in the discourse of North and South.
I believe this opportunity will help me develop a comprehensive understanding of global urban transport governance and contribute to a more engaged North-South dialogue in mobilities research.
Dr. Gaurav Mittal