Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai — A Book Discussion

CASI Seminar
Lisa Björkman
Assistant Professor, Urban and Public Affairs Department, University of Louisville
Center for the Advanced Study of India
3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

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.

[Event Flyer]

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.