What Patrick Geddes did in India: a few steps too far?
29th April 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM BST
This talk will consider the time that Geddes spent as the first Professor of Sociology at the University of Bombay. He produced a series of town plans, met a kindred spirit in Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and then left. What was his impact on colonial India?
Speaker Biographies
Roger Jeffrey is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of South Asia, University of Edinburgh. His academic publications focused on public health and health policy, especially maternal and reproductive health and access to medicines, as well as secondary schooling. Since 2015 he has been researching the ‘footprint’ of India in the city of Edinburgh, and the lives of women who qualified as doctors in the UK between 1877 and 1916. He edited India in Edinburgh, (Delhi and London, 2019); a further volume, edited with Friederike Voigt, Perceptions of Empire: Edinburgh’s Engagement with India, was published in India in February 2026.
Professor Liz McFall is Director of the Data Civics Observatory at Edinburgh Futures Institute and Personal Chair in the Sociology of Markets. She is an interdisciplinary sociologist with research interests that cross the social studies of insurance, cultural economy and market studies. Her recent research explores historical, spatial and infrastructural connections between institutional investment, urban governance and everyday social life. This informs the Data Civics programme which draws inspiration from Patrick Geddes in its emphasis on using digital and experimental ethnographic methods to investigate the social, political, cultural and economic dimensions of civic planning, governance and placemaking.
