Aditi Mehta

Aditi Mehta is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Program and was a 2020-2021 Community-Engaged Learning Faculty Fellow at the U of T Centre for Community Partnerships. Aditi designs courses and research projects in collaboration with community partners for the purpose of social change and, through her pedagogy, reflects on the process of knowledge production. Her research critically examines discrimination, inequality, resource divestment and media bias against marginalized urban communities, and identifies promising new social and technological infrastructure that can help address these disparities. Her research process emphasizes participatory action research to ensure that affected communities are not mere subjects of academic research, but, rather, are co-creators of public knowledge. She was recently awarded the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Partnership Engagement Grant for her participatory action research course in which U of T students and youth members of the non-profit FOCUS Media Arts collaborated to conduct research about how young religious and racial minorities in Regent Park have reimagined and repurposed city infrastructures to support their communities. Aditi completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where she was awarded the department’s most outstanding dissertation prize for her investigation of the politics of community media in post-disaster cities. Aditi was also awarded the Institute’s highest public service award for co-designing and co-publishing about MIT’s first course inside prison.

Publications 

Mehta, A., Brennan, M., & Steil, J. (2020). Affordable Housing, Disasters, and Social Equity: LIHTC as a Tool for Preparedness and Recovery. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(1), 75-88.

Steil, J., & Mehta, A. (2020). When Prison Is the Classroom: Collaborative Learning about Urban Inequality. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 40(2), 186–195.