Lisa Björkman
CASI Spring 2015 Visiting Scholar
Research Scholar, Transregional Research Network (CETREN), University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Lisa Björkman is 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 forthcoming 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. Her current research in Mumbai is a multi-sited ethnography of the making and remaking of the city’s affordable housing stock, exploring the multiple and divergent developmental imaginaries articulated through actual material reconfigurations of urban spaces, neighborhoods, and infrastructures. Lisa received a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research in New York in 2012.