Naomi Hazarika, PhD student in Geography, has received the prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Grant funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Foundation funds doctoral or thesis research that advances anthropological knowledge and particularly welcomes proposals that integrate two or more subfields and pioneer new approaches and ideas.
This dissertation fieldwork grant will fund a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in informal settlements in the city of Delhi, India for her dissertation research tentatively titled ‘Urban ‘Re’-development: Financialization, Caste and Embodied Infrastructural Realities of Slum Redevelopment in Delhi, India’.
Her dissertation examines a policy of slum redevelopment called “In-Situ Slum Redevelopment and Rehabilitation on Public-Private Partnership Model 2019” implemented by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in the city of Delhi and aims to study the historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible for private capital and the postcolonial state to push for projects that translate into the dispossession and displacement of historically marginalized communities in Indian cities. Studying an urban infrastructural project as an ethnographic site, her study uses a multi-scalar, embodied approach to argue how dispossessions around urban redevelopment and housing remain simultaneously rooted in the everyday, lived, and bodily dimensions and in the processes of capital and finance.