Pavithra Vasudevan (she/they)

Pavithra Vasudevan is Assistant Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies, and a faculty member of the University of Texas Feminist Geography Research Collective. Her scholarship and teaching are concerned with how racialized peoples and landscapes are devalued in capitalism and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. As a critical and feminist geographer, Vasudevan’s work examines structural oppression through the embodied experiences, everyday lives, and political practices of communities threatened by hazardous environments. Her dissertation research on the racialized burden of toxicity in the aluminum company town of Badin, North Carolina was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Society of Women Geographers, and the Center for the Study of the American South. Their book manuscript in progress,Toxic Alchemy: Black Life and Death in Industrial Capitalism, theorizes the relationship of Blackness to racial capitalism through an ethnographically grounded examination of aluminum smelting. Vasudevan holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.