Susmita Rishi is an associate professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning at Kansas State University. As an urban scholar, her work challenges and reconceptualizes hegemonic epistemologies (theories of knowledge), and pedagogies (methods and practices of teaching) that undergird the overarching fields of urban and built environment studies. Her research and scholarship lie at the intersection of housing, social production of home, informality, and southern theory. Her ongoing research in India investigates residents’ use, appropriation, and understandings of their spaces in informal housing, to expand the knowledge on which planning decisions are made