with discussants:
Lisa Mitchell (Associate Professor, South Asia Studies, and Director, South Asia Center, University of Pennsylvania)
Philip K. Oldenburg (Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University)
About the Author:
Lisa Björkman is an Assistant Professor in the Urban and Public Affairs Department at the University of Louisville. Previously, she was a research scholar at the University of Göttingen’s Transregional Research Network (CETREN) in Göttingen, Germany. Her work studies how global processes of urbanism and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial exclusions and inclusions in Mumbai, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contestation and representation. Lisa’s book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, October 2015), is a political ethnography about the encounter in Mumbai between market-oriented urban development reforms and the material politics of the city’s water infrastructures. Pipe Politics was awarded the American Institute of Indian Studies’ 2014 Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Lisa received a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research in New York in 2012. She was a CASI Spring 2015 Visiting Scholar.