Vinita Govindarajan

Vinita Govindarajan is a Doctoral Student in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. Her current research interests focus on the institutional logics of Indian state-led environmentalism in the context of climate change and its associated forms of inequalities and injustices. She holds a master’s degree in Human Environmental Geography from the University of Oxford. Prior to starting her PhD at Columbia, Vinita managed partnerships and strategic communications at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Oxford, an interdisciplinary community of researchers working on climate change and sustainable development in India. She was also Head Editor of the climate magazine Anthroposphere. Her previous work as a journalist for online newspaper Scroll.in covered the social and ecological fallouts of urban planning and policy in Tamil Nadu, including the aftermath of the 2015 Chennai floods. She was awarded the Ramnath Goenka and Red Ink Awards for environmental journalism in 2018.