UJJU AGGARWAL is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Schools of Public Engagement at The New School. She is co-editor of What’s Race Got to Do With It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality (Peter Lang, 2nd Edition, 2019), and co-editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly “Together” issue (Fall/Winter 2019), and is completing her first book, a historically informed ethnography of choice as a key principle of education reform and management which emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States. Ujju brings a long history of working to build local and national organizations that work for educational justice, immigrants' rights, and transformative justice as well as projects that focus on the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy.

As a GIDEST Fellow, Ujju will focus on a project that draws on historical and ethnographic methods to explore the story of a group of women who came to be known as the “Harlem Nine.” Placing their story in dialogue with the contemporary period, this project examines the visions of a right to the city and the attendant spatial imaginaries invoked by those who bear the brunt of exclusion.