Author Bio

Sayak Roy (he/him) is an urban cultural geographer and Ph.D. student in Geography at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign (UIUC), USA. He holds an M.A. in Geography from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India, and an M.Phil. in Urban Studies from the African Centre for Cities (ACC), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

His research investigates how spatial networks are produced at the intersection of urban geography and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with a particular focus on cities in the global South. He examines communication and material infrastructures, urban space, night-time geographies, network theory, and southern urban epistemologies, contributing to broader debates in STS.

Trained in interdisciplinary traditions across geography, planning, architecture, sociology, and non-academic knowledge systems, Sayak draws on a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. His background in landscape architecture as a drop out—shapes his ethnographic sensitivity to urban infrastructures.

His current work explores how fiber-optic networks are designed, installed, and experienced in everyday urban life. Positioned between landscape architectural thinking and infrastructural geographies, his research traces the multimodal production of networks and shows how material, technical, and spatial logics configure cities as nodes within global systems. He also uses network theory as a conceptual infrastructure to analyze the production of uneven geographies through global–local entanglements.

In addition to his academic work, Sayak creates multimodal ethnographic content inspired by his interest in travel vlogging, documenting the installation, maintenance, and human labor involved in shaping public perceptions of digital information‑technology's material infrastructure.