IGU Gender Commission Grant Awardees
2025 AWARDEES
The Commission is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2025 IGU Gender and Geography Commission Research and Travel Grant Award - Neha from Jawaharlal Nehru University and Saanchi Saxena from the University of Turin. Congratulations to both of you on your research in gender and feminist geography!
Neha works as a PhD research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India where she studies African Studies. This work is mostly about autobiographies written by South African women who have lived outside of South Africa. Neha is interested in how race, gender, and geography affect identity and everyday life by examining space, displacement, and struggle through the lens of feminist geography and postcolonial feminist theory. She holds an M.Phil. in Women and Gender Studies and has presented work at various national and international conferences. This work supports a paper she is presenting Borderlands of Identity: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Space in South African Women's Diasporic Narratives" at the IGU Thematic Conference in Cairo, Egypt. This grant makes it possible for Neha to attend and participate in academic meetings such as this.
Saanchi Saxena is in her final year as a doctoral candidate in urban geography at the Interuniversity Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. She has a BA in Anthropology and a Masters in Public Policy from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Her doctoral project involves an ethnography of women street vendors in Mumbai, focusing on gendered negotiations of vending spaces and networks, state responses to urban informality, and the co-constitution of gender, caste, and urban space in Indian cities. Part of her work also involves public engagement as the co-founder of Academic-ish, a virtual platform making academic works contextual and accessible that focuses on voices and issues from the Global South. The travel grant will support Saanchi’s presentation, "Street vendors 'versus' the middle-class: gendered contestations in online activism spaces in India" at the Digital Geographies conference, University of Lisbon. This work builds on her PhD research with women street vendors in Mumbai where she intends to excavate relations of power in online and social media activism spaces. Her research analyzes the gendered, caste and class-based narratives mobilized by elite activists in their agitations against street vendors 'encroaching'; upon public space. This project reflects the values of the Gender Commission by situating the centrality of feminist thought in critical digital geography research.
PAST AWARDEES
Maria Anne Fitzgerald (she/her) is a Senior Writing Fellow at the Centre of Writing and Communication at Ashoka University in India. Her research interest include geographies of young people, social geographies, feminist methodologies, visual methods, feminist interventions in academic spaces, DEIJ advocacy research and the Anglo-Indian Community in India. Fitzgerald’s research draws on the recurrent themes of identities, belongingness, emotions, and liminality that informed her doctoral study about the embodied everyday experience of place, across different spatial scales among young people from cross-cultural families in India. Her collaborative blog ‘makingspace’ documents and shares their identity experiences. She received the 2022 Annual Award for New and Emerging Scholars, sponsored by Gender, Place & Culture: A journal of Feminist Geography.
​Zeynep Kuyumcu (she/her) is a PhD student in Gender Studies at the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. She has a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University where she completed her ethnographic research on spiritualities and sexualities of LGBTIQ+ Muslims in Turkey in 2020. Zeynep is also part of Future of Democracy: Cultural Analyses of Illiberal Populism in Times of Crisis (FUDEM) Research School which is a multi-disciplinary research and education environment in Sweden where a group of senior researchers and PhD students are doing research on diverse cultural forms of illiberal populism in the climate of democratic crisis. Her research interests lie at the intersections of gender and sexuality in Turkey, feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements, homonationalism, and the Anthropology of Islam. Her current research focuses on exploring the hegemonies around political, queer, and spiritual imaginations under the illiberal populist and religious authoritative regime in Turkey based on an ethnography of LGBTIQ+ Muslims in Turkey. Zeynep is also a queer-feminist activist based in Istanbul and on the board committee of Havle Women's Association which is the leading Muslim feminist organization in Turkey.
Elybeth Sofia Alcantar (she/her/they) is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. Although born and raised in San Diego, California, Elybeth’s family are Mixteco (Ñuu Savi) migrants from the municipality of San Mateo Etlatongo. Elybeth uses ethnographic methodologies, story mapping, testimonios, and photography to demonstrate the current political and ecological landscape of the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico as well as the geographies of displacement from the region. Her projects have been featured in museum installations, such as Arte Américas’s exhibit, “Boom, Oaxaca,” in Fresno, California and a forthcoming manuscript will be published in the journal, Latino Studies, later this year.
Website: https://www.elybethalcantar.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elybethalcantar
Stefany Paula Álvarez Alvarez (Temuco, Chile) es Geógrafa titulada por la Universidad Católica de Temuco (2015); Máster en Estudios de Mujeres, Género y Ciudadanía por la Universidad de Barcelona (2022) y actualmente es Doctoranda en Geografía en la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (2022-2023). Sus postgrados los realizó gracias al financiamiento del programa Becas Chile para Máster (2019) y Doctorado en el extranjero (2022). En el área profesional, se ha desempeñado como docente en universidades regionales de La Araucanía, además de trabajar en proyectos de investigación con financiamiento de FONDECYT, FONDART, WWF, FONDEF y otras instituciones de investigación y desarrollo. En el ámbito científico, fue premiada en el XVII Encuentro de Geógrafos de América Latina en Ecuador (2019) y por el Instituto Geográfico Militar (2022) en la categoría poster científico. La Corporación +Mujeres líderes en La Araucanía (2022) le brindo un reconocimiento en la categoría Ciencia, Innovación y Tecnología. La línea de investigación desarrollada en sus años de estudios se enfoca en la comprensión territorial, género y mujeres, interculturalidad e interseccionalidad; geoenseñanzas y divulgación científica a través de diferentes estrategias formativas como Sistemas de Información Geográfica online, charlas y debates, exposición en seminarios y congresos nacionales e internacionales. Actualmente vive en Catalunya.
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(English translation)
Stefany Paula Álvarez Alvarez (Temuco, Chile) graduated from the Catholic University of Temuco (2015). She has a master's degree in Women, Gender and Citizenship Studies from the University of Barcelona (2022) and is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2022-2023). Her postgraduate studies were financed by the Chile Scholarships program for Masters (2019) and Doctorates abroad (2022). Stefany has worked as a professor at regional universities in La Araucanía, in addition to working on research projects financed by FONDECYT, FONDART, WWF, FONDEF, and other research and development institutions. She received awards at the XVII Meeting of Latin American Geographers in Ecuador (2019), the Military Geographic Institute (2022) in the scientific poster category, and the Corporation +Mujeres leaders in La Araucanía (2022) in the Science, Innovation and Technology category. Her research focuses on territorial understanding, gender and women, interculturality and intersectionality, as well as geoteaching and scientific dissemination through different training strategies such as online Geographic Information Systems and presentations at national and international seminars and congresses. She currently lives in Catalonia
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefany__paula/