I am a Ph.D. student in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin. My research lies at the intersection of environmental justice and informal planning in the context of South Asia, more specifically in Bangladesh. I am committed to shaping my academic and professional work around the knowledge and lived experiences of marginalized communities whose interests are hardly reflected in planning practice and research paradigms. In doing so, I am eager to explore the tensions between local knowledge production and traditional development approaches in shaping the planning and design of the built environment discourse for those communities.