PhD defence: Between resilience and risk: Women negotiating safety and access to public transport infrastructures in Dhaka

This thesis is concerned with women’s equitable access to public transport in Dhaka (Bangladesh), and how their everyday experiences of navigating patriarchal urban spaces impact on their access, experiences, and negotiation of transport spaces. It engages with questions such as: is the feeling of safety fixated on materiality or malleable? Are the experiences of (un)safety in transport homogenous among women, or do class/capital and other differentials exclude some women more than others? What role do social institutions play in transport-related exclusion of women? How do women navigate this dynamic and difficult urban environment, and with what mobility outcomes?

To answer these questions, the research adopts an inter-disciplinary conceptual framework combining elements of risk, respectability, mobility capital, agency, biopolitics and assemblages. In doing so, it offers insights into the conceptualization of safety from a feminist-affective lens, emphasizing women’s rights to the city. The research uses a multi-methods qualitative approach, and draws on in-depth interviews with female bus commuters to capture lived experiences, ethnographic observations of women’s mobility on two-wheelers, go-along interviews in Dhaka Metrorail, workshops and key informant interviews with Dhaka transport authorities.

In addition, a comprehensive systematic review of interventions in South Asia and a discourse analysis of print media in Bangladesh sheds light on the structural issues of transport ecosystems underpinning these gendered inequities. Overall, this study contributes to the emerging scholarship on women's right to public spaces in Bangladesh and other South Asian contexts, with a critical account of the systemic layers of social complexity, institutional and structural transport policies linked to trajectories of rapid urbanization.