Dr. Siddharth Menon (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Urban Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He uses geographical political economic frameworks to examine global uneven development in two broad research areas:
- Infrastructures and urban environment change in the Global South
- Transnational South-South economic and cultural interdependencies
Siddharth’s first book, tentatively titled Infrastructuring Place: Counter Topographies of Global Urbanism in the Indian Ocean World, draws on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across India and the Persian Gulf to examine how the changing built environment of Kochi city in Kerala, India – through the production of “world-class” infrastructures – intersects with wider scales and circuits of transnational remittance investments from Gulf-based Indian diasporas, construction worker migration from the Bengal delta, and sand extraction from the Western Ghat mountains in southwest India in an era of recurring climate change events.
Siddharth holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and has received fellowships from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. His research trajectory builds on a decade of architectural training and professional practice in India’s construction industry where he used sustainable building technologies – like earth and bamboo – to address issues of poverty, inequality, and environmental change (see Architecture Work Sample, 2016).
Siddharth Menon 